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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'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!
I don't think we have to worry about this. Two reasons:
1. The Earth is really big. Like, really really big.
2. Tonnes and tonnes of stuff is falling to Earth every day in the form of meteors etc., adding to the overall weight of the earth. Even if they burn up it re-entry, the remaining dust and gases or whatever have still got to weigh the same as the original rock.
If you're looking for stuff like that to worry about, worry that low-Earth orbit is getting too cluttered, and that one day there might be what the Scottish Sci-Fi author Ken Macleod called an ablation cascade in his book The Sky Road.
An ablation cascade is when a small-ish collision in orbit results n a whole bunch of high-speed fragments flying off and causing secondary collisions, and the whole thing spiralling off into a domino-rally-type exponentially-increasing SNAFU, until the Earth is surrounded by deadly high-speed fragments of metal meaning that we can't leave the planet for hundreds and hundreds of years.
now that's scary.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!