Professor Colin Pillinger waits for signals from the Beagle 2. (AP)

London, Dec. 26 (Reuters): Scientists will resume their hunt for a missing Mars probe today after two attempts to find the Beagle 2 space craft failed in the hours after it was supposed to have landed on the red planet.

The failure to pick up a signal raised fears that the probe, no bigger than an open umbrella, had suffered the same fate as many craft before it and ended up as scrap metal strewn across the bleak Martian landscape.

“We didn’t actually see anything...but we are not in anyway giving up yet,” Professor Colin Pillinger, the lead scientist on the British mission, told a news conference.

The probe is due to start transmitting again around 1815 GMT for 80 minutes, said Pillinger, who is head of the Planetary Space and Sciences Research Institute at the Open University. After that there are 13 scheduled transmissions before the probe goes into emergency auto-transmit mode.

Pillinger said a telescope from Stamford University in California would also join the search. Dutch astronomers tried but failed to track down the probe yesterday.

Beagle 2’s failure to make contact capped a dismal Christmas Day for the mission’s scientists, trying to answer a question which has fixated mankind for generations — “Is there life on Mars?”

They had gathered in London in the early hours yesterday, hoping to hear the probe broadcasting its signature tune — composed for the occasion by pop group Blur — across the 100 million km from the red planet. But Beagle 2 remained silent and scientists were forced to wait 16 hours for a second chance to detect the probe — this time using the Jodrell Bank telescope.

The 300-million euro ($375 million) Beagle 2 is the first fully European mission to be sent to any planet and has been hailed as a triumph for British ingenuity and European space exploration.

Officials at European Space Agency (ESA) headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany, remained hopeful the Beagle 2 will still send a signal to indicate it has arrived.

But they stressed that even if Beagle 2 is not found, the Mars Express mother ship that brought the 34 kg probe to Mars had successfully been guided on to an orbit around the red planet, where it will study Mars for two years.

“The landing probe on Mars is in essence the icing on the cake,” said Gerhard Schwehm, an ESA planetary mission official.