British scientist Colin Pillinger led a project that aimed to land a probe on Mars, what was the probe called?

The Beagle 2 was a British Mars lander that was transported by the European Space Agency's 2003 Mars Express mission. It was an astrobiology mission that would have looked for past life on the shallow surface of Mars.

The Beagle 2 was conceived by a group of British academics headed by Professor Colin Pillinger of the Open University, in collaboration with the University of Leicester. The project was designed and developed by several UK academics and companies.

The spacecraft was successfully deployed from the Mars Express on 19 December 2003 and was scheduled to land on the surface of Mars on 25 December; however, no contact was received at the expected time of landing on Mars, with the ESA declaring the mission lost in February 2004, after numerous attempts to contact the spacecraft were made.

The Beagle 2's fate remained a mystery until January 2015 when it was located intact on the surface of Mars in a series of images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE camera. The images suggest that two of the spacecraft's four solar panels failed to deploy, blocking the spacecraft's communications antenna.

The Beagle 2 is named after HMS Beagle, the ship used by Charles Darwin.