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Fingers Crossed for Beagle
Adam_Trask writes "Never has a spacecraft been built so quickly, on so little money, and been sent on such a long journey fraught with so many dangers. Beagle 2 has been carried to the vicinity of Mars by the Mars Express mothership, and released successfully to go its own way for the final leg of the journey."
Hip hip - Horray!
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
.. as a WWI veteran flying on his doghouse to Mars.
I personally think this must be one of the nicest Xmas presents in a while. And hopefully this one won't go awry and actually produce the results everyone in the community hopes for.
Anyone else thinking about 'London, The Beagle has landed'..
Mad.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Available here.
This is Tranquility Base...the Beagle has landed!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
...that are crossed, or we'll not see beagle 2 again until the invasion.
Adam_Trask didn't write that summary. Dr David Whitehouse, BBC News Online science editor did, and Adam_Trask just lifted the sentences out of the article. Shouldn't the poster make that clear?
Download my free songs!
If this probe does manage to survive, then it will be a testament to the skill and abilities of the engineers and managers who helped build it. Hopefully, its success will inspire the bean counters to be a little freer in their funding in the future ;)
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Adam_Trask writes "Never has a spacecraft been built so quickly, on so little money, and been sent on such a long journey fraught with so many dangers. Beagle 2 has been carried to the vicinity of Mars by the Mars Express mothership, and released successfully to go its own way for the final leg of the journey."
Actually those words were written by Dr David Whitehouse, BBC News Online science editor.
How is the 2nd post redundant?
I don't think giving the Brits kudos for their effort is redundant in comparison with the 1st post, a GNAA post.
Stupid mods.
"When Beagle gets to the surface its power is almost spent and it must immediately open up and expose its solar panels to the sunlight to charge its batteries and run its systems. Too much of a delay and it will die."
:)
Sounds sortoff like the ipod. After a year in space the battery doesn't hold much of a charge.
"Beagle survives on the energy from its solar panels and has no way to clean them if they get dirty because of, say, a dust storm."
Havn't they considering using windshield wipers. They come as standard equipment on all cars but I guess on space probes they are an optional extra that wasn't purchased
-?-
How long before we can expect such technology in our cars? Such cars would just bounce back in a collision. Not to mention the potentials for bouncing airplanes!
Perhaps the best science book I've ever read is A Traveler's Guide to Mars. This book is full of the latest imagery from various mapping missions, and the author (well known planetary scientist William K. Hartmann) tells you, in clear enjoyable prose, basically everything we know about Mars and how it has been figured out. It turns out that Mars is way more interesting (and wet) than you probably expect. If you plan on following the Beagle 2 mission and the two NASA rovers that follow next month, then this is the book to have.
G.
The bags werent fully tested? Havent they heard of Murphy's law?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
The article is full of gloom and doom. It makes it sound like there's no chance at all that it will succeed. I hope it's not as bad as all that. I think they're just trying to keep everybody's hopes from getting too high. Well, my hopes are high anyway. And whatever happens, watching this story unfold will be much more fun than watching some stupid parade with giant inflatable balloon cartoons.
i don't like my old sig.
Never has a spacecraft been built so quickly, on so little money, and been sent on such a long journey fraught with so many dangers.
I didn't know Ford made spacecraft!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I love the British people; they are friendly, clever, well spoken, and generally well thought out.
That said, most everything they build is always missing one key ingredient. Maybe poor interface, maybe a critical technical componenet is under-engineered.
I hope it succeeds, but I have a funny feeling about this one.
Of course, I believe the two NASA probes will put two huge craters in the surface; we used to be a decent engineering nation. Now we forget critical pieces of spacecraft design. Our record in the past few years is apalling.
Go figure... The Hubble.... oops, we didn't check the f*cking thing would *work* before we sent it up. The last Mars probe "well, sh*t, metric, imperial what's the difference". The Shuttle "Lets design a complicated brick that if it gets a tiny nick, it burns up on reentry".
It's refreshing to read some space odyssee report that is not full of state propaganda and overblown optimism. After reading the article, I felt like that we were probably going to lose Beagle, but also, I actually felt really excited about the mission. I care. Good journalism and insider reporting! Thank you, BBC.
Think of the environmental impact to outer space with all of that oil leaking from the British spacecraft.
You mean Shiloh is dead?
I had my fingers crossed for him, I swear! Marty, why did it have to be this way? You were supposed to save him!
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
I would assume the difference between entering a nitrogen atmosphere vs a carbon dioxide atmosphere is the larger heat capacity of CO2? Alternatively, it could be a result of greater drag due to the larger mass of CO2 and the ability of CO2 to deform more readily than N2 and thus increasing its effective coefficient of friction.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Reading the article, I can't believe the Beagle was actually launched. The odds are stacked well against it. It WILL be a miracle is this mission is a success.
Maybe that's why they planned a Christmas Day landing, what with it being the time of miracles.
Anyone else getting tripped up by the author's choice of referring to the nose cone as one word?
nose cone
nosecone.
nosecone?
WTF?
no secone? No Habla!
nosec one?
Oh! Nose cone! Sheesh!
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
You mean Christmas, right?
Wow, a post that makes the moderators look bad gets censored.
How surprising and how disgusting.
Sieg Heil, Moderators!
It gets energized by laying in the sun, just like the dog in the comic, so I think its a good match.
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
As an artist, I'm especially interested in the artistic ambitions of the Beagle 2 mission. They plan to play a song by Blur for the Martians and use a Damien Hirst painting to calibrate the spectrometers. Seems to be a well-rounded adventure.
Oh wait, that was another flying beagle.
In terms of expectations/cost factor the Beagle/Mars Express is perhaps the most ambitious one, therefore the high emphasis on what could go wrong in the Beeb article. A kind of be hopeful but keep your fingers crossed thingy.
Either someone dropped the ball and sent an ill-conceived and poorly desined ball of crud probe to Mars, or the BBC is attempting to create some kind of sensationalism in its reporting of this piece.
Does anybody will know what the truth of the matter is?
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
The name beagle doesn't exactly inspire much confidence.
Pit Bull, Bull Dog or Rodesian Ridgeback would have had a better chance of surviving.
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
It's unlikely to do much to boast the british space industry. There is little space funding outside british funding of ESA and ESA only contracts out to companies/universities for an equivalent sum as that nation put in. There doesn't look like the UK is prepared to change it's space funding arrangements (too much of research funding is tied up on the ground based observatory stuff) and so the british space industry is unlikely to benifit. This coupled with the increased protectionism in NASA will limit any boast British space projects might get.
I'm guessing from your comment that you've made an in-depth analysis of every British engineering project since the Wall of Hadrian, analyzed their flaws, and developed a report. That's important scholarship, there.
"The British" don't have a cultural blindspot to engineering any more than the Jews have a love for money.
Any patterns you see are the same you'd see with hindsight in any nation's engineering projects.
It carries no passengers.
It has no propulsion system
It's not even airtight.
Instead of "spacecraft", wouldn't it be more accurate to call it a "box"?
Oh well. At least they dare to do the impossible. Lets hope it doesn't land on some martians head.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... when reading the title? I thought that maybe Portos was in some real trouble on the next episode or something...
;)
had me worried
Never has a spacecraft been built so quickly, on so little money, and been sent on such a long journey fraught with so many dangers.
It has gone so far for so long with so little, it is now capable of doing anything for anybody with nothing, or even less.
I needed the picture to figure it out. Getting old I guess. Damn kid journalists making up new words. Why when I was there age we had only 1 word and we liked it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Beagle 2 is named after the Beagle which is the ship which on which Charles Darwin was the naturalist and undoubtley gave him the opportunity for a lot of his later works.
Here.
People, engineers included, learn from mistakes. Maybe it will show that somtimes it is worth taking a risk.
Or maybe it will be a big expensive hunk of charcoal, but either way I'm sure they will learn something valueable from doing this.Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
>"Wall of Hadrian"??
Hadrian's Wall was a Roman project, surely??
And it's "analysed", you under-educated fop! :-)
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
Okay, I know, I'm a kook, but it seems like some government entity has been trying to keep NASA from getting a good look at Mars, but now that this European probe is out of that reach maybe it will get to the bottom of all this and get a good picture of the Face Of Mars and maybe some ruins.
And now, we return you to our regularly scheduled program...
It's about time you guys jumped in to the fray. Good Luck!!
Aurora roadmap:
More information: ESA or Spacedaily.
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
"Bagel 2"
Ouch!
.
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
...without having to nip back to the lab for a cigarette.
All things in moderation; including moderation
> It's unlikely to do much to boast the british space industry.
> This [...] will limit any boast British space projects might get.
Judging by all the Slashdot posts there's absolutely no shortage in the boasting department. Oh, you meant BOOST?!
I'm guessing some Brits were involved in its construction: that's a long way to bring labor.
Hadrian's Wall was a Roman project, surely??
Yeah, the project managers might have been Romans, but you can bet that they outsourced the actual development and maintenance to the local barbarii.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
In fact they the Romans were early pioneers of pre-fabrication techniques so the wall was in fact constructed in sections in Rome and then shipped over and bolted together in situ.
Maybe I'm missing something but does anyone have an idea of when the Beagle 2 is supposed to start sending its signal back to verify it survived?
I've looked in several places and either I'm blind or the time is not listed.
Perhaps it has a projector and trailers for future Mars missions?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If I'm to believe the article, then all odds
are against a successful mission. Why not lower
the objectives a little, and pass on the landing
attempt?
The article makes it appear to be a doomed
mission.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
How much weight would have to be launched into space before it has a noticeable effect on earth?
Are there any theories on this?
Did they use Power Point to present the design at no more than 3 bps (bullets per slide)? It all makes sense if you measure it in bps instead of bits per second.
But this isn't German or Swedish; the same logic could endorse removing all of the punctiation from text because Thailand doesn't use any. It's not a matter of the logic behind the language, but rather the mechanics of reading one particular language. English text in ALL CAPS over the course of several sentences trips me up as well, because the hints on separation are less pronounced.
:)
btw, regarding the definition you got from dict.org for a nose cone, notice that you did not get it by looking up nosecone. I know cause I tried it before I saw your post
+5 Insightful for someone who talks about Bagels not boasting about missions, eh?
Sheesh.
Does that Beagel come with lox or cream cheese?
Clear, Dark Skies
Roman is to British what British is to American. So Hadrian's Wall is an American project, surely.
I stole this
"the whole thing is being controlled from the National Space Centre in Leicester, where you can actually go and watch the control centre in action."
Actually, it's being controlled from the "European Space Operation Center" in Darmstadt, Germany.
Timothy approved a much more informative summary article Yesterday, in the Science section, here, detailing all the issues encountered before landing.
on CNN!
I hear the cameracrew are already on their way,
when the shit hits the fan, it is not equally spread
"The British" don't have a cultural blindspot to engineering
Yes, we do. Culturaly speaking, we don't take it seriously.
I mean being an engineer, what kind of job is that - you'll get dirt under your fingernails for a start, and no amount of washing will shift it. And it's not as if you'll actually be doing anything useful. Engineers are little more than jumped-up petrol-pump attentants. It's such a working class occupation.
The Civil Service now that's a nice respectable job. Good pay, and after years of indifferent effort you'll stand a good chance of a gong from the Queen. Now wouldn't that be nice.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Fast, cheap, and it works: these are the fruits of the vast American investment in space exploration. Everyone else in the world, from China to corporations, is trying to catch up on our expertise. We need a visionary in the White House who will capitalize on our investment, backing American startups which will build American energy and industrial production in Space. The current President thinks the Moon is made of green cheese, and Mars is a candy bar. Who is running for the office next year that knows any better?
--
make install -not war
First post. And then the NASA will reply back "You failed it"
You saw "Greatest Britons" with Jeremy Clarkson on Isambard Kingdom Brunel then ;) I do like being British. We can stand on a moral high ground because we tend not to get involved anymore...
George Bush frightens me, if for no other reason than that his administration ignores and deliberately surpresses information gleaned by scientific method if it contradicts his fundamentalist Christian beliefs; I suspect he's got more than a little of the "book burner" gene in him.
Having said that, I think in the long run history will judge him as the right guy for the times - sometimes the times just suck, that's all.
Why do "The British" merit quotes and the Jews don't?
What is this meant to imply?
The article mentions various hardships involved with sending a probe to Mars, and after reading it, I'm left to assume that the CNN screen-bottom taglines Christmas morning will read, "ESA probe lost on Mars reentry..." [If the craft didn't originate from Mars, shouldn't it be called "entry"? But I digress.]
I wonder if the article is fairly judging the likelihood of failure of Beagle under these circumstances. Isn't it generally hard to send a probe to Mars? If it's so hard, and so gloom-and-doom, why do we bother at all? I counter that it is hard, but that the engineers and the launch controllers (often forgot!) will pull it off.
Has any American news agency given a good treatise on the hazards encountered by American probes being sent, and if so, were we so awe-struck that any of our probes ever made it?
I think that the usual doom and gloom applies to most anything space-oriented, and we should not be especially ruffled at the hazards outlined in the article. This sounds like another case of artificial drama pumping to sell a few hits of a webpage.
Yank - Brit - Roman - Greek - Cretian - Egyptian - Ethiopian. then it's true, Hailie Selassie was american. Ja love.
Not usually. The Roman army was more like your modern Russian of Chinese army which can be used for engineering projects when necessary. Generally it won it's campaigns then started building for the peace by constructing the infrastructure it needed to occupy and control.
A pattern the modern-day American army would do well to learn from I think.
Absolutely.
I ran into a woman at an airport last week who was an English teacher. We chatted, compared kids, that sort of things, had the "where have you been ? what have you been doing ?" conversation, and I was bitching about the appalling lack of imagination of the engineers I had been working with in Egypt. She then said "Imagination ? Oh an engineer doesn't need imagination. Its all about punching numbers into computers" I restrained myself, but pointed out that there was quite a lot more to it than that.
Its a complete cultural blindspot. C.P. Snow explored our national attitudes to science in his 1950's book "Two cultures". Little has changed, except we now make less than half of the stuff we made even by 1979 standards.
Steve
It'll do lots for the British space industry if they find evidence of life on Mars. ;-)
Tony Blair: "I have extremely good news to report from Mars this afternoon. Our probe to Mars has found Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction."
Ho hum. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where being able to argue the toss about various passages from Shakspeare is held in higher esteem than being able to apply Newton's Laws to real situations, or where arguing the toss about various "issues" is more highly regarded than making rational, impartial, scientific observations and assessments. Nyeah.
Stick Men
How true.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Don't they know some Yemeni men own Mars? This is old news, but three men from Yemen sued NASA for tresspassing as documented in this 1997 CNN story. According to the article these individuals have a 3000 year old claim on the red planet. What they do not realize is that my past life regressionist told me in a past life more than 5000 thousand years ago aliens gave Mars to me. Therefore, their claims are null and void.
Are you forgeting Jaguar? Nice cars, but the mid-eighties models at least had horrible reliablity problems.
Black pudding and fried eggs, with a hit of whisky from the hip flask, are more probable British space foods.
Viagra
How big-ass would your telescope mirror have to be in order to count the zits on the ass of an armadillo on mars? Seriously, how big would it have to be to be able to recognise a human face?
Eat at Joe's.
A neat concept. Unfortunately, I think the design team was visualizing the hard pack on a ski slope, or sand dunes in the Mojave, rather than the -100C, ice impregnated, rock hard soil the probes actual hit... basically a sandy glacier. The JPL post-mortem report (http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/mpl_report_1.pd f - 400KB) ripped the project up one side and down the other for poor planning and testing, and virtually non-existant program management. Hell, if the project lead had so much as pitched a prototype off the roof onto the sidewalk at JPL, she would have had a pretty good approximation of what they were in for, IMO.
The upshot was that the project was doomed to failure on the shoestring budget.
Luke, help me take this mask off
But please keep in mind that ESA does not mean English Space Agency and some other countries have also been involved.
ESA is the European Space Agency.
Without some sort of fluid, the wipers would scrape the dry dust across the solar cells. The resultant scratches would decrease the amount of light getting into the cells. W/ a fluid (and it can't just be a methanol/water/glycol solution 'cause it would just freeze) there would be less scratching, but there could be instrument contamination from dirty fluid, and it would add way too much extra mass. Some sort of electrostatic device might work though.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
But the British optimist in me hopes it *will* work, simply because when the odds are completely stacked against it, when everybody says a British invention can't *possibly* succeed... that's when it generally pulls through.
So godspeed, Beagle 2. Say hello to Mars for all of us - and preferably let us all hear Blur and see Damian Hirst while you're doing it.
You must think in Russian.
I can see it now, little green people pointing up to the red sky screaming.
"OH NO! it's the earthling mothership and they're sending a probe down to kill us all! RUN FOR YOUR DAMN LIVES!"
be quite the opposite of the usual earthling fearing the martian.
"Never has a spacecraft been built so quickly, on so little money, and been sent on such a long journey fraught with so many dangers."
Never has Churchill been so abused by such poor parodies.
While it appears that the Beagle 2 probe is on the right flight profile to make it to the Martian surface, the fact there are increasing dust storms on the planet's surface could hinder the operation of the probe. Beagle 2 could suffer the same fate as the Soviet Mars 3 lander, which made it to the surface but failed after 20 seconds of transmitting data due to the dust storm on Mars at the time. :-(
I saw this and the first thing I thought of was that someone was reviving Beagle Bros, the awesome Apple II software company from the 80's.
One wonders why the same software implementation was run on the backup computer. If it failed on the primary what would make it work correctly on the backup?
It would be better to have the backup use a separate implementation using different algorithms where it was possible.
The British are the best engineers in the world, rah-rah. Now go and puke, Poppycock.
I stole this
more stuff from the Beagle 2 weblog
Listening out for Beagle 2
The 76m Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory is ready to try and find Beagle 2 on Christmas evening. At 10:40 pm GMT Beagle 2 will begin to transmit an on/off sequence each minute - like very slow Morse Code - and about nearly 9 minutes later the signals should reach Earth. The transmitter power, at 5 watts, is little more than that of a mobile phone, but the team at Jodrell Bank have installed a very sensitive receiver to pick up the Beagle 2 frequency. See more details on the Jodrell Bank website>
Betting on Life on Mars
Ladbrokes, the bookmaker, has cut its odds of finding life on Mars from 33-1 to 25-1 after a flurry of bets following the successful separation of Beagle 2 from Mars Express. Whilst these might not be true odds, the firm has taken the decision to minimise payouts in case Beagle 2 finds any evidence. Bets have been placed on the "Life on Mars" outcome since 1969. Link to Times story
This is my Christmas present. We need more good images from Mars to fire up the public imagination to go to space. We'll need it too, because it'll take billions of dollars to fund the next steps, lots more probes and an eventual manned mission.
No no no..you have it all wrong. When you fill up the tank in an American car, half of the fuel is actially getting teleported to an American gas station. That's how America get's so much gas so cheaply. If you want to increase your milage, be sure to find the vortex generator and disable it.
As one of the Apollo astronauts once said, and I paraphrase "when sitting up there in that capsule you realize that your butt is strapped to something built by the lowest bidder"
This is the problem of most failed missions...things that should have been checked, replaced, double-checked, improved or what have you are not done because of cost and profit. Tie the payoff to the success of the mission and things will vastly improve...but they will cost much more.