Colin Pillinger: One man and his dog, bound for planet Mars

The IoS interview: Colin Pillinger, professor of planetary science and inventor of Beagle

The year is 1956, and in an ordinary house near Bristol, a boy named Colin Pillinger hunches over the family radio to listen to that week's episode of Journey into Space. Nearby lies a copy of the Eagle comic, its cover telling the latest instalment of Dan Dare, spaceman.

Fast forward to 2003. That boy is now professor of planetary science, and this son of parents who never found the means or sense of adventure to go abroad is about to land on Mars. Not in person, but in the shape of his greatest experiment, the all-British Beagle 2 probe. Should it succeed in its aim of finding traces of life on the Red Planet, then Professor Pillinger, already being hailed as the man of science to watch this year, will be responsible for one of the most remarkable events in history: the discovery of life beyond Earth. Not bad for a gas fitter's son.

Talking to him in his office at the Open University, or watching him as he lectures at Birmingham University on Friday, the square-jawed Dan Dare is not exactly the first person Professor Pillinger reminds you of. Nor is it Stephen Hawking or Carl Sagan, the legends that the amiable prof is probably about to replace as the new face of science.

Magnus Pyke or David Bellamy come more easily to mind, as Professor Pillinger shifts around in his comfy sweater, smiles a toothy grin, and talks in the wonderfully elongated Is and As of his Bristol roots.

"As a scientist, I am very lucky," he says. "I am a chemist who is working with physicists to go into space – that's astronomy – and study rocks – geology – and look for signs of life, which is biology." And when he's finished polymathing, home is rather different to most people's. "It's a 30-acre small farm in the middle of nowhere and it's a kind of rest home for decrepit animals." There are 16 ancient cows, a horse, two pigs, a pair of dogs and more than a dozen cats. His infectious enthusiasm for, well, everything, is, you suspect, even stronger than when he left Swansea University as a young PhD in the late Sixties.

His plan had been to go to the States, but an opportunity came up to study moon rocks at Bristol. Pillinger jumped at it, and his lifetime's work investigating extraterrestrial material began. He turned to meteorites, and at Cambridge and the Open University, he developed techniques for classifying these according to their chemical composition. By using what was known of the Red Planet's atmosphere, he was able to test which specimens came from there, in effect devising a Mars "fingerprint".

By the mid-1990s he had found strong circumstantial evidence that Mars had once contained water; and when, in 1997, he heard the European Space Agency was planning a Mars shot, he began pestering them to include a "lander" on it. They replied that they didn't have the technology or the money; Pillinger stepped in. So was born Beagle 2, christened in honour of Darwin. "Lots of people said it couldn't happen ... but I can be pretty bloody-minded, you know." And persuasive, too, winkling out £7m from the Government.

Beagle 2, which in size and appearance is not unlike an extremely hi-tech dustbin lid, is being finished over the next four weeks in Milton Keynes. "It has to end up at the launch site in Baikonar in Kazakhstan at the beginning of March to be built on to Mars Express, and then, on 23 May, the launch window begins."

After riding piggy-back for 93 million miles, it is scheduled to land on Mars around Christmas. On the ground it will open up, its 10ft-long "mole" will begin to burrow, samples will be taken, analysed and the results transmitted back.

The project has been characterised as a cocoa-tin-and-string operation; but images of it as a sort of Norman Wisdom moonshot are wrong. It is a very modern, as well as very British, affair. Beagle 2's call signal has been written by Alex James of Blur, the graphic against which instrument calibration will be checked after it has parachuted to the surface of Mars is a Damien Hirst spot painting, and sponsorship is now being touted by Saatchi & Saatchi. But funding is not something he loses much sleep over: "As Lord Rutherford said: 'Think harder'. It's not necessarily a good thing to have unlimited resources. People respond to a challenge."

Would he like to be remembered as the man who found signs of life on Mars? "That doesn't bother me." But he does want to show that science can be fun. "I'm trying to motivate the kid from the council estate to look at science and say 'I want to try this'."

Biography

Born 9 May 1943

Educated University of Wales, Swansea

Married Judith, a micro-biologist; two children

Posts and honours include Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, research; Open University, head of Planetary and Space Sciences; Fellowship of Royal Society, Royal Astronomical Society, Meteoritical Society; Gresham Professor of Astronomy

Consultancies include Nasa Discovery Mission, Genesis, to collect a sample of solar wind; European Space Agency missions to investigate meteorite erosion effects in space.