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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."
Its strange, under the useful links the Guradain didn't list the beagle 2 own web page.
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.
karma capped
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.
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
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.
Table-ized A.I.
The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity do have a microscopic imager on board.
karma capped
The Beagle 2 has a microscope with 6 micron resolution: beagle 2: cameras