Professor Mark Sims on the discovery that Beagle 2 made it to the surface

With just a month to go until the 2016 opposition of Mars, the Red Planet is now visible very low in the southeast before midnight for observers in the heart of the UK. Mars and ringed planet Saturn are presently separated by just over 7 degrees — a low power, wide-angle binocular field of view. The waning gibbous Moon passes by on the mornings of 25—26 April.

Sunday 6 November marks exactly 24 weeks since planet Mars was at opposition in the summer sky. It is also the date when you can see the Red Planet close to the six-day-old waxing crescent Moon low in the southern sky an hour after sunset in the British Isles and Western Europe.

Images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provide dramatic before-and-after shots of Mars showing the impact of a global dust storm that has obscured the surface.