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.

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

[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

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.

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