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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.
Uhh, NASA has already been to Mars, multiple times.
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.
Argh damn formatting :P
o bal/M2K4/God_high.movo bal/M2K4/water_high.movo bal/M2K4/Sixminutes_high.mov
http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-gl
http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-gl
http://anon.nasa-global.speedera.net/anon.nasa-gl
How is this so? Why are the US projects so much more expensive?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
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
"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.
Java gaming nut - http://www.retep.org/ or for the rail http://uktra.in/
A good resource if you had no clue what was going on, like me.
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.
Actually a different budget constraint ended up pushing NASA ahead; in the early sixties, the russian rockets were way more powerful than the american ones, so very tight weight and size constraints forced the american efforts to focus much harder on miniaturization. This, in the end, proved to be a much more effective edge than bigger launch vehicles.
:)
I hate to say this (as I am a scientist myself, and appreciate funding as much as the next guy), but constraints are in many cases a great motivator and focusing lens on what is truly important. With a nearly unlimited monetary/time/resource-budget, you'd likely waste most of it on nonessentials; in many cases perhaps the essentials would never even be identified, but lost in the sea of nice-to-haves.
Naturally, the above does in no way affect my particular work, which is always essential and topical, so please do not hesitate to send me lots of money, ok?
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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!
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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.