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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."
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.
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.
That would be 'Leicester, the Beagle has landed' - 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.
Although actually it's going to announce itself by playing a tune by Blur, as well as using a Damien Hirst painting to calibrate the cameras.
"Information wants to be paid"
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.
It's named after the beagle, which if I remember rightly was the ship Captain Cook used to sail to Australia and through the pacific. I guess it's trying to conjure up the image of exploring to great unknown.
Well, half right. It's named after the Beagle, which is the ship on which Charles Darwin was the naturalist, which visited (among other places) the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin formulated much of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
But Snoopy already went to space!
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
Just a quick FYI: the actual landing site name is Isidis Planitia. (Don't click the resources link unless you like pink...)
karma capped
How the H.M.S. Beagle got Her Name
If you can read this sig - the bitch fell off.
Aurora roadmap:
More information: ESA or Spacedaily.
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You'd have trouble adapting to Sweden and other countries like Germany. :-) Where we always write two words as one, and it's even considered bad practice to separate them. The reason is because of problems like this:
:-)
"ice cream" vs "icecream". Here, "ice cream" (written in swedish) would mean "some cream made of ice" literally, while "icecream" would be a completely different word meaning, well:
A smooth, sweet, cold food prepared from a frozen mixture of milk products and flavorings.
I.e. what you probably mean with "ice cream".
Because of "problems" like these, swedes, germans and probably many more, write words together if they mean something special when written together. Or, uh, something like that.
"nose cone" in swedish would be "a cone you put on your nose", or something weird like that, while "nosecone" is a special "thing", in this case:
The forwardmost, usually separable section of a rocket or guided missile that is shaped to offer minimum aerodynamic resistance and often bears protective cladding against heat.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Better yet, they filmed it for BBC2. We saw the bugger fail first time round. But in the end it had to go on time or not go at all.
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
Guess we need a super-smart AI to pilot the ships then.
great book.
What I meant to say though was they mentioned on Radio 4 just yesterday that 50,000 tons of new material is deposited on Earth every year - mainly in the sea and mainly in very small particles.
so we're a way off a net loss...
08:20Zulu December 25th.
Happy to help.
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
Timothy approved a much more informative summary article Yesterday, in the Science section, here, detailing all the issues encountered before landing.
They didn't use the Ariane 4 software by accident. They intentionally re-used the software (presumably with some constants changed) and tried to save money by omitting thorough re-testing.
See section 2.1 of the report on the Ariane 5 failure for a full explanation of how it happened.
They were basically told 'hey, want to send a probe? it's got to be ready next week and weigh less than X kg' so they had to rush it.
See the official History
OK, so they had 5 1/2 years from 'hang on lads, I've got an idea' to launch date - but NASA usually take a lot longer than that to design, develop and test probes.
So they're taking a gamble, on the basis that it's better to try and fail than never try. And if it works, it'll be fantastic.
Mark
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You are both almost right :-)
The National Space Science Centre, Leicester, UK hosts the Lander Operations Control Centre (LOCC). The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK hosts the Lander Operations Planning Centre (LOPC). And Darmstadt, Germany is the location of the Mars Express Mission Control, which handles the spacecraft which was carrying Beagle 2 until a few days ago, and which will be used (along with NASA's Mars Odyssey) to communicate with the lander.
More info from sunny Leicester. (Actually, it's raining here right now.)
I've never visited the NSSC, although I only live about 2 miles away from it. (It looks like a giant condom.) Sounds like Christmas would be a good time to get over there.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Well that's interesting as the only Britsh cars are those well out of the league of regular drivers. You could go back a few decades to find the likes of Morris and Rover, but most people here on /. aren't even two decades old.
Of course, these days, even those quality vehicles are owned by US or Jap companies. The real problem cars are those made by Ford and GM (Vauxhall in the UK), both are US companies despite their UK image.
The UK also has an annual vehicle inspect for road worthiness, unlike some states in the US. We have some real trash on the roads.
Ah... ironically, in Britain, American cars have the reputation of doing about ten miles to the gallon and belching out pollution as if global warming was a left-wing conspiracy ;-)