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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."
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.
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.
I didn't check on this, but the Beagle probe doesn't weigh as much as a car, and it has a parachute to slow it down. You probably wouldn't have enough time to deploy a parachute and have it open and slow you down enough to make a difference.
I wonder if they could do something like in the movie demolition man, with the foam. That would be sweet. And it should taste like chocolate or something.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
"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".
I'd agree with you on Hubble -- that was just stupidity. Regarding the metric/imperial -- who the fuck knows how that happened? But that's not bad engineering, that's bad project planning. As for the Shuttle, bear two things in mind: 1.) a crack in the leading edge of the wing is not a nick, and 2.) you're also looking at a design that's almost 30 years old.
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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.
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.
Yes, I'd be happy to see a probe that manages to land on Mars for once. :-) It's sad to see those crashing probes. Even better would be if it not only landed, but also found something interesting while looking for life to create some hype! Would be good for NASA et al. as well. :-/
:-P
:-)
Oh, you missed a failed probe too:
NASA's Mars Polar Lander May Have Landed Safely
Not that I really want to bash anyone for their failed probes. When you think about it, it's awesome they have even got probes to land over there. However, I could personally have been without things like mixed up distance units.
And it's not only NASA that makes these kind of mistakes. Read and weep:
"When the European Space Agency's Ariane 5 blew up less than a minute
into its maiden mission several months ago, it was revealed that the
disaster was created by a software bug -- a program that tried to push a
64-bit number into a 16-bit space. About $7 billion was written off in
that single disastrous explosion."
The reason for this? They accidentally uploaded the Ariane 4 software to the Ariane 5 before launch. Needless to say, the rockets didn't work exactly the same.
This math bug caused both the primary and backup computers to hang.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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?
IIRC the hubble debacle wasn't all that stupid. The mirror was tested thoroughly, it was the testing apparatus that was screwed - and even that was only down to a fleck of paint under one of the bolts holding the thing in place. I wouldn't bet my house on it though, I'm probably wrong. A costly mistake nonetheless.
"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.
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