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."

Comments

Re:Direct Links to movies

[zeroclip]

Argh damn formatting :P

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

Separation pic

[mlush]

Here is a link to the seperation picture of Beagle 2 taken by Mars Express

Beagle's not ESA either

[EricTheRed]

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.

The BBC's Take...

[merikus]

The BBC has a good summary of the descent, and the mission generally, at "Beagle glides solo towards Mars."

A good resource if you had no clue what was going on, like me.

Re:ET life was suggested by Christ himself

[s20451]

Sorry to reply to my own post, but I just remembered that the Catholics have a whole doctrine on extraterrestrial life (can't find a link right now, sorry).

One Vatican astronomer says the possibility that humanity is alone in the universe is madness. Weirdly, the Jesuit order maintains observatories for the Vatican, some of which do important astrophysical research!

Beagle software

[orbitalia]

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.