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

Science is world-wide

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Direct Links to movies

[zeroclip]

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

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:What edge?

[azzy]

Yeah.. 'cause Beagle 2 will be playing Blur tunes when it lands... it's hip and cool!

Anyone else think it's kinda sad ...

[Chitlenz]

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.

Merry Christmas, Mars

[H8X55]

"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...

Beagle software

[orbitalia]

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.