All the ingredients for life on Mars exist.

At the beginning, some people thought we were a 'me too' mission: Send a lander to Mars and take a picture.

Planetary protection is important and if one were to discover life on Mars then it would be perfectly sensible to say that there are certain areas that ought to be protected,

A little set back like a lost lander should not discourage visionaries.

You'd also want to use lunar rocks as building supplies - it is so costly to lift even an extra kilo of steel into space, running to many hundreds of thousands of dollars,

Unlike (the NASA) robots, Beagle 2 won't be going sightseeing. It is intent on discovering where there is or was life on Mars. It is happy to trade measurements for mobility.