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Beagle II Successfully Separates
Control42 writes "After the long journey out, it seems that little Beagle II, the lander of the Mars express mission has successfully separated. If all goes well, the lander should touch down on Christmas Day. Seems that NASA has actually lost the edge in robotic space exploration." Reader chalker writes "In order to build public interest in the Mars Exploration Rovers 2004 missions landing in January, NASA has released a series of movie trailers (Flash enabled page, Windows Media and Quicktime formats) for what they are calling "M2K4". They contain quite amazing animations of the landings, as well as a professional artistic style typically seen in action movie trailers.
Additional videos on the launch, cruise, and landing challenges can be found at the JPL based mission site."
for those of us that dosen't like to view the movies in our browsers. http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-glo bal/M2K4/God_high.mov
http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-glo bal/M2K4/water_high.mov
http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-glo bal/M2K4/Sixminutes_high.mov
Here's the Mars Express Webcast. They talk about the training missions they went through and some of the science they'll be doing while they get telemetry in about how the separation was going.
And the post doesn't make clear that this is all EESA, the Beagle has nothing to do with NASA or its probes.
Then please explain to me where the edge is. What is the basis for the comment in the blurb? Nasa alreadly has 2 orbiters at mars, Last touched down 9 years ago, has sent probes to every planet and the sun, and The Esa has sent one to mars ( and also one to the sun If I remeber correctly).
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Here is a link to the seperation picture of Beagle 2 taken by Mars Express
Beagle 2 wasn't funded by ESA either, they just piggybacked for the trip.
There was a lot of publicity by the Beagle 2 team over the last few years to get the funding. The UK government only put in (I think) 2 million after they had the promise of other institutions would pay up (and I'm not sure they have got the money back yet).
The mission is almost entirely privately paid for.
The only link with NASA is that they will be relaying the first signal to see if it landed ok, and ESA agreed to allow Express to be used as a relay for NASA's rovers.
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
A good resource if you had no clue what was going on, like me.
Petrol has been sold in litres for about 10 years.
Metric units have been taught for years (30+?) in schools.
Our national mapping agency, the OS, produce maps with grids in metres or kilometres.
Everything apart from the road network is marked up in metric form. We still use miles for the road network though.
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John 10:16: "I have other sheep, which are not of this fold; ..."
...".
Some suggest that this passage implies that there is intelligent life other than on Earth. It's a little thin, but other religious beliefs have sprung out of even more tenuous evidence. At the very least, if ET life is found, the Christians could point to this passage and say, "We knew all along
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Curious -
NASA officially uses SI units. It's the contractors who still use antiquated units.
You havn't by any chance an URL ? Or are they not published yet ?
You can find it here.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
Having been involved with space work a bit the software aspect of the Beagle lander is quite interesting - the reason I know about it is we used the same compiler on the Galileo signal generator project.
ADA is still very popular amongst the European space companies and agencies (for a good reason I think) and particularly the ADA95 Ravenscar profile which gives a miniscule runtime the actual runtime is only about 4-5k which is pretty good considering that contains everything you need to execute the ADA code including tasking.
There is another opensource attempt at a ravenscar compiler called openravenscar funded by ESA here - for Sparc and Intel platforms . Ravenscar is basically a profile that removes the more complex features of the ADA languages to give a mathetmatically provable scheduling - so you can always cater for your worst case scenario. Such small executives are neccessary due to the prohibitive cost of rad hard EEPROMs as most missions have some sort of inflight reprogramming requirements. I think they are using the ERC32 processor which again, is an open source processor, along with its replacement LEON, you can even download the vhdl for the Sparc based leon here
Heres hoping Beagle makes it through the Martian atmosphere and takes some pictures of little green men.
> The Sojourner rover from the 90s did very little science because it was mostly wheels and batteries.
I disagree, it did carry a simple but sophisticated instruments that has been used on foreign soil so far, the Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS). The wheels and batteries and solar panel where just build around that instrument to make it mobile since it hat to be placed directly on the surface of the material (rock, dust) you want to investigate.
I guess the reason you don't remember anything about it is that this instrument doesn't produce fance pictures and such, it just tells you the chemical composition of rocks and such, how boring.
Why do you think these overlords are British. As the ESA is a european project these overlords will be a group of europeans from different nations all more or less opposed to the others.
So before they will "rule" the mars they will start a debate about everything. And the will build coalitions in their institutions. e.g. France + Germany against GB + Italy or the big Countries against the smaller ones etc.
So they won't really controlling Mars.