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

Hope

[Cujo]

It's probably too much to hope that we'll learn as much from the voyage of Beagle 2 as from that of Beagle 1, but that is my hope that goes with it.

More realistically,just some good data that further constrains any theories about Martian life.

two-leg match

[BobTheLawyer]

is it childish of me to giggle at how many Americans must be mystified by the great football (as in soccer) analogy?

Best of British

[fruey]

What I find so amazing about this (national pride aside) is that the budget is so low, and yet the science done on this mission is allegedly more complex and thorough, quoting from the Yahoo news story I just read "It will be far cheaper and contain far more science than either of the two U.S. Martian rovers that will be landed from Mars Odyssey in January."

How is this so? Why are the US projects so much more expensive?

Re:Best of British

[Gumshoe]

Why are the US projects so much more expensive?

NASA spent a shedload of money developing vehicles that can navigate the Martian terrain. This will be needed for future missions I'm certain but I don't understand why they have implemented it this early. At this stage of the game, one region of Martian terrain will be just as interesting as any other region. Why bother scooting off to "that rock over there" when "the one right next me" is just as scientifically useful?

Re:Best of British

[jridley]

one region of Martian terrain will be just as interesting as any other region

Uhh, no. I went to a talk a few months ago by a planetary scientist where she talked about site selection. There was a LOT of argument about it. Mission parameters (direct-to-Mars crash landing mode) limited touchdown sites to somewhere around the equator, but there was still a lot of choice.

The two sites look very interesting. One is a plain where there appears to be a lot of hematite, which we believe is formed primarily by iron in water. If there's really a bunch of it there, that indicates a hell of a lot of water in the past.

The other area is in a crater where the wall has been breached, it looks like by a river, and a whole lot of debris has been washed into the crater. This means that a hell of a lot of material from a wide area will have already been washed into the area for us to look at without having to travel very far.

All in all, I expect a really fun time the next few months.

Re:Best of British

[BuilderBob]

The answer is possibly related to the Scientists involved.

The Spirit and Opportunity landers may have been made by experienced scientists in scientifically clean labs and using wind tunnels designed for the military.

Beagle2 (not the Mars Express Orbiter) was cobbled together with pop groups and artists. There's a picture of the project PI (Collin Pillinger) pushing Beagle2 on a shopping trolley. This wasn't a "let's play up the low price tag" PR photograph. He really was transporting the lander on a shopping trolley.

There is then the technical complications. NASA have built two remote controlled sem-autonomous rovers, they have been designed to move about on terrain which has never been seen (from the ground) before. The Sojourner rover from the 90s did very little science because it was mostly wheels and batteries. The only thing I remember from the Sojourner mission is a rock named Yogi.

The thing that separates the two missions is really only the PR. NASA tried to get the fancy rover factor that worked well with Sojourner, and even borrowed a few tricks from Beagle2 in their "were using musical tones to represent spacecraft state".

Beagle2, on the other hand, has a PI who can get people to work for free with the promise of fame (and fortune?). using an artist to paint a spotted calibration plate for the spectrometers/cameras which a scientist would have otherwise done. Using a pop group to play the "mission success" tune on landing (which, I have no doubt, will come through in crystal clear surround sound in the Lander Mission Control).

Going to Mars is expensive, Beagle2 was only cheap because a 300 million Euro orbiter was going that way anyway. Venus Express is recycling the Mars Express engineering models (and will be cheap).

It also has less than 1 in 3 chance of success (3 out of the last 5 failed). Nozomi is dead. 100 million USD doesn't buy what it used to.

BB

Re:Best of British

[Textbook Error]

pushing Beagle2 on a shopping trolley. This wasn't a "let's play up the low price tag" PR photograph. He really was transporting the lander on a shopping trolley

It may have been a genuine photo, however he would have been pushing a shell or one of the mock-ups used for assembly testing. The actual lander itself was assembled in an Aseptic Assembly Facility (aka "clean room"), and transported to the launch site by truck on a sealed container. This container was about 2-3m on each side, and lifted into the truck on a pallet. The seal had to be intact from the time it left the AAF until it was inserted into Mars Express, as one of the biggest concerns has been that we will end up shipping some Earth microbes along with Beagle 2 - and giving false positives when it starts looking for microbes on Mars.

Blur's call sign is simply a couple of bytes used to identify packets coming from Beagle that can be mapped to a table of notes back on earth. It will doubtless be played through a futuristic-sounding synth for PR purposes, but then how else would you "play" eight or nine bytes... :-)

Which isn't to say the project hasn't been an incredible achievement. It's been done on an absolutely miniscule budget/schedule compared with other lander missions, and it's a real achievement to have even made it this far given the paucity of space funding in the UK.

I don't think it would be a big deal

[HarveyBirdman]

I'm a practicing agnostic, but I know several quite religious people who also believe in life elsewhere in the Universe. It's not that big of a deal, really. The question tends to be raised by those with a stereotypical view of "religious people". Always try to remember that in our society the most vocal and visible members of any group are the Gaussian tail types.

It definitely has separated ok

[EricTheRed]

I've just seen the first picture taken by Mars Express of Beagle 2 just after it separated.

I think this is the first time a spacecraft has taken a picture of another outside of earth orbit (ie the only previous ones are manned missions in either Earth or Lunar orbit).

You forget.

[maroberts]

Lots of British hold lovingly to their pounds, gallons and miles per hour.

Even the documentation I saw used non-SI units, so the possibility of a screw up still exists.

Re:You forget.

[Mysticalfruit]

Well our currency (American Dollar) has always been metricised... 100 pennies = 1 US dollar.

Gasoline has been sold in 3.8 litre increments more than 10 years!

Metric units have been tought in school for 30+ years as well..

Our national mapping agency, the USGS, produces maps using that are in both square miles and square kilometers. Just make sure you order the right map...

The road signs in the US are inconsitent, (like my spelling mind you!) Some signs has just miles on it, others have both miles/kilometers.

Re:Lost the Edge?

[leonardluen]

seems to me that nasa has TWO probes that are to reach mars in january. instead of a single one like the ESA. so they haven't lost the edge yet

http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressrel ea ses/20031202a.html

We'll see how it goes...

[Glock27]

Seems that NASA has actually lost the edge in robotic space exploration.

Seems to me that we should wait for the probe to actually land, power up, and communicate before we judge how far the EU has caught up.

With some of the coming propulsion breakthroughs, these missions are just scratching the surface (so to speak;) anyhow.

Godspeed the Beagle, but don't count eggs yet

[pease1]

The national pride in this thread is great to read, but if I were a brit, I wouldn't be counting my eggs yet just because the chicken has started to squawk.

There are still many things that can go wrong; remember the poor record of successful missions to Mars spans all countries... Russian, Soviet, US and now Japanese.

For one thing, be sure to keep an eye on growing dust storms on Mars... they appear to be mostly confined to the southern hemisphere now, but that might change... and Beagle 2 is landing at only 11 degrees north.

We ALL stand to gain from a successful Beagle 2 mission as well as successful NASA missions.

MER Animation

[captaineo]

I created all of the animation in these pieces associated with NASA's MER mission.
The best way to view them is the 9-minute launch-to-landing music video at:

http://athena.cornell.edu/the_mission/rov_video.ht ml

And downloads including a DVD-spec MPEG-2 stream at:

http://www.maasdigital.com/gallery.html

I also made a bunch of new animation for a NOVA documentary, "Mars, Dead or Alive," which will be shown on PBS January 4-6 (the first MER landing is late night Jan. 3).

The trailers NASA made look neat. Wish they had used our 24p master rather than interlaced video sources though.

Mars Express info...

[rlink]

There is a US experiment on Mars Express, part of the ASPERA-3 (Analyzer of Space Plasma and Energetic Atoms, http://www.aspera-3.org/) instrument package. I'm a member of the science team for this instrument, and you can see some of my computer simulations of the interaction of energetic space plasmas with the Mars environment at http://www.aspera-3.org/model.pdf.

Here's an email I got yesterday:

Dear colleagues,

We are very close to our target! On Dec. 19 Beagle - 2 will be separated
and on Dec. 25 Mars Orbit Insertion executed. ESA is going to cover both
events on live TV on the ESA television and, of course, Internet. Below
follows a short time table for the main events.

All times are in CET (Central European Time ) = UT + 1

December 19
07:51 go/no-go decision to proceed with Beagle-2 ejection
08:21 spacecraft slew starts
08:51 spacecraft slew ends
09:31 first confirmation of separation

ESA TV sending
09:00 - 09:32 approx. (Internet 09:09 - 09:32) First sequence
11:25 - 11:47 approx. (Internet 11:25 - 11:47) Second sequence
12:00 - 12:10 approx. (Internet 12:00 - 12:10) Third sequence

December 24
21:00 MOI "go / no go"

December 25
02:47 MOI execution
02:50 Beagle 2 landing
05:15 Beagle 2 contact with Mars Odyssey

I will inform you about exact times of ESA TV live sending for December
25 later.

The permanent ESA channel:
Astra 2C at 19 degrees East
Transponder 57, horizontal, MPEG-2, MCPC
Frequency 10832 MHz, Symbol Rate 22000 MS/sec, FEC=5/6
Service name: ESA TV

Merry Christmas,
Stas

and another one ...

Check out ESA's picture of Beagle-2 now
separated from Mars Express.

http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/index.html

Cheers,
Rick

Re:Oh for the love of everything holy

[dotwaffle]

"Bu hu, look at what the Americans can do!"

Yup, they can land on the moon to show off to the Russians they are better!

"Bu hu, we'll build or own GPS and you can get lost!"

Too right, for the simple reason that every time the US goes to war, we don't want to have crap GPS in Europe. Put simply, if we owned it, it'd stay up all the time, rather than bowing to political pressure.

"Bu hu, the Euro is strong, the dollar is weak"

But the GBP is in the middle reaping the benefits!

"Bu hu, we saved you weakling European ass in WWI and WWII".

Bollocks... You haven't won a war. Ever. Well, apart from your own Civil War, and you couldn't lose! The Allies won WWII, thanks to the Russians, thanks to the British, and in part thanks to the Americans. That's because we were allied. The Americans don't get to steal the thunder, no sir. WWI was in fact won by the British by the way, the British were helped by the Americans, in such small numbers, that we would have won anyway. Just remember, we won through negotiation with the enemy, not blowing them to smithereens. November 11th, 11am, a day each Briton remembers that those who died, did die for a just cause, and that it would have been worse had negotiations have been abandoned. Maybe the US could learn a lesson from the Europeans... Beating the crap out of people isn't always the greatest idea.

Not an attack on Americans there, just America and it's politics. Americans are generally nice people, they just have a really shitty government. Move here to Britain while you still can! ;)