Close encounters of the BritArt kind

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Little green men – or any other extraterrestrial art connoisseurs travelling in our part of the Milky Way – will soon have the chance to appreciate Cool Britannia first hand.

Damien Hirst, the ageing enfant terrible of BritArt, yesterday unveiled his latest work – a palette of coloured spots designed to fly on board Beagle 2, a British spaceprobe scheduled to land on Mars in a year's time. The spot painting will help scientists discover if we are alone in the universe. It will provide a colour chart for the calibration of the probe's spectrometers – which will search for signs of microbial life on Mars.

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Close encounters of the BritArt kind

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