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Beagle 2: Mars Landing On A Shoestring

Posted by timothy on from the there's-dirt-on-your-shoestring dept.

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."

5 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. Begun on a Beer Mat by ajax0187 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth." - George Carlin
  2. missing link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  3. Re:Shoestring is the right word by snake_dad · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

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  4. Microscope? by Euphonious+Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:Microscope? by dexter+riley · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.