PARIS -- Ground teams controlling Europe's Mars Express orbiter today braced the satellite for its insertion into Mars orbit, heating its fuel tanks and shutting down its on-board computer to prepare for tonight's all-important maneuver into an equatorial orbit around the Red Planet.
"We are perfectly on schedule and all the spacecraft's systems are performing well," flight operations director Michael McKay said in a telephone interview from the European Space Agency's Mars Express control center in Darmstadt, Germany.
"You could cut the tension with a knife here now as we prepare for a few interesting hours," McKay said.
The probe is less than 12,400 miles (200,000 kilometers) from Mars and is expected to be just 257 miles (414 kilometers) above the planet's surface when its main engines are fired to avoid collision and place the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit.The 34-minute engine firing is scheduled to begin at 9:47 p.m. EST (0247 GMT Thursday).
Using NASA's Deep Space Network of Earth station antennas, the Mars Express team should know within minutes whether the orbital insertion has been successful, McKay said.
The Beagle-2 lander, which separated from Mars Express on Dec. 19, has been hurtling toward Mars just ahead of Mars Express and is scheduled to enter the Mars atmosphere just before 9 p.m. EST (0200 GMT Thursday).
The first possible signal of whether the lander has survived the journey will be delivered by a signal captured by NASA's Mars Odyssey satellite, already in orbit over Mars.
Odyssey will have between 10 and 20 minutes to receive a Beagle-2 signal before passing out of view. Confirmation of Beagle-2's health should be available to ground teams by 1:30 a.m. EST (0630 GMT) Thursday if Odyssey picks up anything.
If no signal is received, project managers will be in the dark on the lander's status throughout the frigid Martian night.
In what Beagle-2 managers have said will be the make-or-break moment of the mission, the lander's signal the next morning could be picked up by Britain's Jodrell Bank Observatory shortly before 6 p.m. EST (2300 GMT) Thursday.
Mars Express and Beagle-2 are both designed to look for evidence of present or past life on Mars.
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