Beagle 2: Mars Landing On A Shoestring

dr3vil writes "A great article in The Guardian about the development of Beagle 2, the Mars lander due to start the search for life on Mars on Christmas day. Some great stories about the struggle for funding, and technical details about using a coat handler antenna and a dentist's tool for grinding rock samples. Obviously this was a great project for the hackers."

Comments

Begun on a Beer Mat

[ajax0187]

Amazing work. Just goes to show that we can still do scientific work on a budget. NASA should take a long, hard look at this project. If they used this approach, we could get next-gen space transports for a hell of a lot cheaper than what we're predicting now.

Earthlings go Lo-Tech

[Bonewalker]

The martians that keep sabotaging NASA's Pathfinder and other probes as soon as they land on Mars, (and laughing their asses off because we obviously don't have a clue about interplanetary travel), will be thinking, Wow, those silly Earthlings are seriously regressing. Must be the solar flares...what the hell is this, a dentist's drill? Ha ha ha!

4 out of 5...

[Anonymous Coward]

..dentists recommend Beagle 2 for their patients who need to drill into rocks to find life.

Shoestring is the right word

[Wanderer2]

25 million quid is not a lot in astronomical terms. Plus the ESA have had to cancel / downgrade a couple of other missions due to lack of funds / problems with the upgraded Ariane 5.

Fingers crossed Beagle lands safely... Colin (the guy wrote the book the article's lifted from) always seems so enthusiastic when he's on TV - it'd be a shame to see him disappointed.

When are the other probes due to land?

Re:Shoestring is the right word

[snake_dad]

When are the other probes due to land?

Spirit Lands: January 3, 2004 between 8-9 pm PST
Opportunity Lands: January 24, 2004 between 8-9 pm PST

From the rover homepage. Also check the Athena science package homepage, and read the news archives to get an idea of how much work went into the instruments alone.

really sad...

[LMCBoy]

I can't believe the lead scientist had to take out a loan against potential future corporate sponsorship to pay for this amazing project. Come on, UK, it's only 25m pounds! I hope they'll at least bail him out if the advertising revenue never materializes.

Or better yet, I hope he gets stinking rich from it! :)

Re:really sad...

[Wanderer2]

The probe's had a fair amount of good publicity in the UK - getting Blur and Hurst in on the project was a great move. Scheduling the landing for Christmas Day was another, although I think that was upto the ESA team on whose probe Beagle is piggybacking a ride. I'm sure the British government would step in with a large dollop of cash if it felt it would make it look good^W^W^W^W^W was necessary.

missing link

[Anonymous Coward]

Its strange, under the useful links the Guradain didn't list the beagle 2 own web page.

Watch the news on the 25th of December

[Jesrad]

Beagle2 is expected to send its results just in time for Christmas. I have some reason to think its findings will be positive (namely: Gil Levin).

A short Media briefing can be found here.

That's awfully agile!

[AtariAmarok]

If they can get the lander to land on a shoestring, I think they can meet the "lands on the head of a pin" challenge shortly thereafter.

Re:That's awfully agile!

[bigsteve@dstc]

You got it wrong. It is a verry looong shoestring.

Microscope?

[Euphonious Coward]

Why does nobody who is looking for life on Mars ever seem to consider putting a microscope on board? If you were wondering whether something was growing in your hummus, you would start by sniffing it, but if 25M UKP was riding on the answer, wouldn't you look at it under a microscope?

They already have a steerable camera on board, so all they needed else was a pair of lenses at the ends of a tube, and a flash. That would have fit within the 100g they had left in their mass budget.

Next time, I guess.

Re:Microscope?

[dexter riley]

A few reasons. First, we don't know what (putative) Martian microbes would look like. Also, Mars is very cold and dry, so any microbes would grow verrrry slowly. This means that the average microbial density on the soil of Mars could be very very low. Looking for bacteria on the surface of mineral grains is tedious and difficult under good conditions, unless you have a lot of bacteria there and know what to look for. Doing the same thing remotely would be vastly more difficult.

You could try adding some Mars soil to a nutrient media and wait for something to grow, before looking at the liquid under a microscope. But, unless you knew the right pH, salinity, and chemical composition that the Martian bacteria would like to eat, you would be more likely to drown (or explode by osmotic pressure) any bugs living in the soil. And again, since we don't know the morphology of the bacteria we hope to find, we would see lots of soil particles, some of which might be enticingly bacteria-like (remember the Martian meteorite and its "microfossils"?) but we would have no proof that they were biological in origin.

As a biologist, I believe that if life is detected on Mars, it will first be "spotted" by ultra-sensitive mass spectrometers, either on a lander like the Beagle 2, or more likely, in an laboratory after a sample is returned to Earth in a decade or two.

Now, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't put microscopes on landers! I'm sure there are some geologists that would be fascinated by the microscopic composition of native Martian soil. But if life on Mars is abundant enough to pick up with a microscope, then we should see clear traces of it with experiments like the one on the Beagle.

Re:Microscope?

[mlush]

But, unless you knew the right pH, salinity, and chemical composition that the Martian bacteria would like to eat, you would be more likely to drown (or explode by osmotic pressure) any bugs living in the soil.

This is very true, If you took a spoon full of earth soil you would not be able to grow 90% of the microbes (1) in it, as the correct growth conditions are not known. You could lob in some sort of generic nutrent broth, but this would not support the majority of bugs in the sample. When the Viking landers tried this there appeared to be some sort of reaction between the soil and the broth.

(1) not just bactria, but yeast, fungus etc etc

Re:Microscope?

[snake_dad]

Why does nobody who is looking for life on Mars ever seem to consider putting a microscope on board?

The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity do have a microscopic imager on board.

Re:Microscope?

[dexter riley]

It's a shame that we've had to wait so long to figure out what that reaction was. Some biologists say it was caused by life, some chemists say it was radicals in the soil, produced by centuries of exposure to UV light. I wish NASA had sent the "Wolf Trap", the assay created by the late Wolf Vishniac, on one of its landers. IIRC, it would have looked for changes in turbidity caused by anything growing in a nutrient broth. It would have had the same problem that the growth media for martian bugs is unknown, but it was simple enough that many different media could be tested, and incubated for long periods to see if anything was growing.

Re:Microscope?

[Yazeran]

An other problem is that we don't know what we are looking for. On earth, microbes can be extremly small (vira as an example) requiring an electron microscope. As anyone who has ever operated an electron microscope knows, sample preparation and microscope maintainance is time consuming and requires a lot of intervention by the user. Although an optical microscope may in principle survive the trip to Mars intact, an electron microscope is almost certain to be unusable after the trip as electron microscopes do not handle vibrations well. During reentry (and launch) the spacrcraft has to endure extended periods of time with a lot of vibrations and high accelerations.

The best thing to do is to send a probe which would pick up a sample and send it back to Earth in a sealed container (with Mars atmosphere and pressure) where geologists / biologists then could take it apart and study it.


Of course the realy best thing to do is send the scientist and their lab gear to Mars instead and do the exploration / analysis on Mars.

Yours Yazeran

Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.

Re:Microscope?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Beagle 2 has a microscope with 6 micron resolution: beagle 2: cameras

Gaia

[Latent Heat]

I agree that it is hard to see stuff with a microscope just sifting through stuff. Apparently there are ecological niches on Earth that have very low density of organisms (i.e. a glass of "pure" water, and some of the stuff discovered is hard to culture).

But one would think that if there is life (on the surface) that it would have left its imprint on the environment, and there is little evidence at that. The only hope is if stuff is living underground.

Note to children and foreigns

[mlush]

Its strange, under the useful links the Guradain didn't list the beagle 2 own web page.

Guradain is a (so called) humorous reference to the frequent typos in the Guardian's newspaper, something that has not been a problem for the last 15 years

....and possibly ending up a beer-mat

[Tablizer]

Amazing work. Just goes to show that we can still do scientific work on a budget. NASA should take a long, hard look at this project.

Don't count your chickens until they are hatched. It hasn't landed yet. Mars is a probe-eater. It ate NASA's Polar Lander, and several Soviet landers, plus some orbiters. NASA won't be very interested in copying a design or budget approach that fails.

Re:....and possibly ending up a beer-mat

[Hatta]

Mars is a probe-eater.

I thought that was Uranus.

Sorry about that one...

Just a question.

[annisette]

With the possible health, social and political reactons to bring potential life back from mars would it be restricted to lets say a section of the ISS? Or perhaps a lab on the moon? I would think that if life was brought back from mars, what to do with it and how to keep it isolated so it can be studies (and preventing an "accident") would have almost the same impact as finding it.