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Beagle II Successfully Separates

Posted by michael on from the lgms-for-christmas dept.

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."

2 of 369 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Direct Links to movies by zeroclip · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Beagle software by orbitalia · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.