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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!
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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?
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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
"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 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
Think of the environmental impact to outer space with all of that oil leaking from the British spacecraft.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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"?
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!
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.
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.
Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Well, the magnificient stations and bridges that Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed/built for the Great Western Railway stood the test of time, retaining both their functionality and beauty. And if you forget the open topped tour buses of London and take a walking tour along the Thames and you'll see how so many of the graceful Victorian bridges still stands despite them not being designed to carry modern multi axled heavy vehicles.
Most British engineering today tends to be rather less assuming but mostly works. The North Sea petroleum industry is one example. The tube is a bit shite at times but you have to consider the lack of investment it had to endure for decades.
Perhaps the greatest reason why British engineering failed to produce some spectacular sucsesses to match their illustrious predecessors is the brain drain - most of the best engineering students left to work in the city for the banking and financial institutions.
At the end of the day you can't blame entire nations, be it British, American, or anyone else for mistakes made by individuals/teams, especially given the cost constraints and management meddlings.
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!
I think you'll find the missing ingredient is money...
Quote of the week:
Interviewer: "What happens if you find life on Mars?"
Prof.Colin Pillinger: "I'll find it a lot easier to get funding for the next mission"
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
Timothy approved a much more informative summary article Yesterday, in the Science section, here, detailing all the issues encountered before landing.
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>.
"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.