* Astronomy

Colin Pillinger, the man who led the ill-fated Beagle mission to mars, has been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.
Colin Pillinger, son of a Bristol utility worker, has already begun work on the next mars explorer, Beagal Evolution.

He gained his PhD from the University of Swansea, Wales, in the late Sixties, and became one of the lucky few Britons to work on the lunar samples brought back by the Apollo 11 Moon landing mission.
Later, at Cambridge and the Open University, he developed techniques for classifying meteorites according to their chemical composition, and has worked on a NASA mission to collect a sample of the 'solar wind', and ESA missions to investigate how meteorites erode in space.
Colin is married, with two children.
He lives on a small farm in Cambridgeshire, where he tends various livestock.