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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."
I, for one, welcome our new British overlords.
Of course, the ESA has the immense advantage over NASA that everyone uses SI units, rather than a mixture of metric and imperial ;-)
Still, its a long way down for Beagle 2 - hope it succeeds.
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Only 5 generations 'til we get to the R2 series!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Helium balloons want to be free.
See the Mars robot scrape up soil samples. Watch it analyse the atmosphere. Be awed by the movement over harsh landscape.
Welcome to Mars!
-Certified TechnoWeinie
Uhh, NASA has already been to Mars, multiple times.
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
So Esa has one probe and Nasa has two. Therefore Nasa is behind?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Why do you still have to think in terms of "losing edges"? The Mars Express mission will cooperate with NASA's "Mars Odyssey" to relay data back to earth. Competition is good, cooperation is better.
Once, I had to get two beagles to seperate by spraying them with a garden hose.
what would happen ? would there be a sudden roar of disbelief or would there be a "god created life there too" statement made, of course we havent decided what consitutes life yet (from our tiny perspective), can silicon or alternativ chemicals have life ? is life just a product of complexity or can simple systems have it too ? does it have to be carbon based ?
How is this so? Why are the US projects so much more expensive?
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Anybody else read that and get kind of disappointed? I mean...I guess it would make it slightly more interesting, but EVERYBODY these days is turning things into action movie trailers. Hell, the whole "War on Terror" on the news seemed like a bunch of teasers and trailers for a big upcoming blockbuster (no pun intended).
I know they're trying to reach a broader audience, and I know they have to compete with Hollywood, but if they need to sink to the level of an action movie trailer to make science interesting then I think we are in trouble.
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Yeah.. 'cause Beagle 2 will be playing Blur tunes when it lands... it's hip and cool!
That a government agency needs marketing and promotional materials? Maybe the x-prize or the Chinese advancements will finally get people back into the 'space' mindset again. We've kind of lost the forward thinking momentum of the first shuttle and moon mission launches where EVERYTHING in America stopped to watch it happen.
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
British-made spacecraft? Damn, that's gonna be impossible to find parts for.
the no
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.
"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."
Awwww, how cute, we gave Mars an Aibo for Christmas...
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.
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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.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
A good resource if you had no clue what was going on, like me.
... you tend to waste it.
NASA as a weak budget but it was used to very big fundings during the cold war.
In Europ space has never been a top priority and fundings have always been really limited. When you have less you try to optimize everything and you tend to do better for cheaper.
Look at the Pathfinder mission with Sojourner. It was a Nasa mission but a mission without a very big funding. It was a tremendous success.
Iraq: war to save the U
Ugh. I've lived in England for 15 years now, and the one thing that I know is that 70% of British people speak almost undecipherable English - the accents are very heavy in most (especially) northern palces. In Inner city areas, you would have problems understanding how much a newspaper costs. That's how bad the dialects are - it makes a good ol' Southern accent seem like a tiny difference.
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The lander is completely unpowered as far as propulsion goes. The separation was successful, but there is still plenty that can go wrong. And the same for the two NASA probes. Let's see how it all shakes out before making any conclusions.
How did this get modded insightful?
Viewing the science and exploration as a competition makes it appear like you are more interested in the nationalistic aspects of it than the scientific.
IF you have to discuss it, the "we've sent waaay more robotic explorers out there" is a pretty bad point.
I live in Denmark, we had Vikings; The vikings ruled the sea for a very long time. After that we had a LARGE fleet that was comparable to the english for the better part of 18th and 19th century.
Now we can just sit back on our asses for the next couple of decades and STILL have ruled the sea for longer than the americans...
This obviously translates into: Danish sailors kicks american sailor ass.
just like NASA kicks everyone elses ass because they went to the moon before everyone else.
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Seems that NASA has actually lost the edge in robotic space exploration.
:) ). There are 2 orbiting mars taking pix (one of which I have code helping to control the cams). NASA sends up 1 or more robotic missions per year. The beagle is EU's first real robotic mission. Other than the US, only Russia has done and robotic missions. NASA has not lost the edge.
Nasa is about to place several landers on mars shortly after beagle. They have landed 3 others on mars already (not including 2 that "landed"
They have lost their funding for various missions which makes them the same as Russia. They have had politicians control what missions take place (by providing moneys for their own local fat cats).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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!
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Well, maybe not yet. I couldn't wait any longer.. :)
I hope the spacecraft does well. I also wish it was possible to read an honest science story without the jabs from left field. Lost their edge? This is based on who's historical revisionism?
Is it rocket science for Slashdot to hire editors who would be considered satisfactory for any other publication to ensure that thousands of people do not have to have a moment of pristine delight spoiled by an editorial policy that rewards knee-jerk jingoism? And how is this even calculated when hours earlier photos were shown from the incredible Spitzer Telescope, which took off from the Cape Canaveral launch facility after being built between the U.S., U.K., and the Netherlands?
It's a simple backhanded comment like this that obviously makes a lot of people feel like they're being fed shit when they could be spending their energy more productively. Geek editor you are unfortunately thy worst enemy. Poster, keep it in your pants! Slashdot, please quickly hire some talent, dudes!
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.
I created all of the animation in these pieces associated with NASA's MER mission.
t ml
The best way to view them is the 9-minute launch-to-landing music video at:
http://athena.cornell.edu/the_mission/rov_video.h
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.
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