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Beagle 2 Probe Lands; No Signal Received Yet
securitas writes "The BBC reports that Europe's Beagle 2 Mars lander has failed to broadcast its landing confirmation signal. While project leaders are trying to put a brave face on it, the failure is seen as a major setback. The Beagle is out of broadcast range but another contact attempt will be made later today, when they hope a signal will be detected. Another failed Mars mission will solidify Mars' reputation as a spacecraft graveyard. More at icWales and News24."
It's like space probes are from Venus and Mars is from.. umm..
nm.
We see thanks to them how far from safe manned flight we are. Once we perfect unmanned missions, we can try to go there ourselfes.
One that hath name thou can not otter
The EU was using the metric system and the Martians are on the English system. Ft. lbs. != Newton meters.
*rolls eyes*
...A Martian parent whose christmas shopping was running late manages to get "a great deal" on an expensive Earth-made toy for his/her child...
I dunno. Russians built about fifteen venera probes/landers to go to venus. they had nowhere NEAR the failures we've had now.
Different technologies though, different times, unlimited budgets... the 70s and 80s were a whole other world when it came to space
Reuters isn't the only one jumping the gun. Yahoo is headlining this story as "lost in space".
It's premature to call the failure to hear the initial signal as a "major setback". For Reuters to do so without attributed that assessment to anyone is sloopy journalism. Why would anyone care what Reuters thinks?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Major Mars missions, 1964 to 2004:
1964 U.S. launches Mariner 3, which fails after liftoff.
1964 U.S. launches Mariner 4. First successful Mars fly-by in July 1965. The craft returns the first pictures of the Martian surface.
1964 Soviets launch Zond 2. Mars fly-by. Contact lost in May 1965.
1969 U.S. launches Mariner 6 and 7. The two spacecraft fly by Mars in July and August 1969 and send back images and data.
1971 Soviets launch Mars 2. Orbiter and lander reach Mars in November 1971. Lander crashes but orbiter sends back images and data.
1971 U.S. launches Mariner 8, which fails during liftoff.
1971 U.S. launches Mariner 9. Orbiter reaches Mars in November 1971, provides global mapping of Martian surface and studies atmosphere.
1973 Soviets launch Mars 5. Orbiter reaches Mars in February 1974 and collects data.
1975 U.S. launches Viking 1 and Viking 2. The two orbiter/lander sets reach Mars in 1976. Orbiters image Martian surface. Landers send back images and take surface samples.
1992 U.S. launches Mars Observer. Contact lost with orbiter in August 1993, three days before scheduled insertion into Martian orbit.
1996 U.S. launches Mars Global Surveyor. Orbiter reaches Mars in September 1997 and maps the planet. Still in operation.
1996 Soviets launch Mars 96, which fails after launch and falls back into Earth's atmosphere.
1996 U.S. launches Mars Pathfinder. Lander and rover arrive on Mars in July 1997, in the most-watched space event ever. Lander sends back thousands of images, and Sojourner rover roams the surface, sending back 550 images.
1998 Japan launches Nozomi. Orbiter suffers glitch in December 1998, forcing circuitous course correction. Mission fails in 2003.
1998 U.S. launches Mars Climate Orbiter. Spacecraft destroyed while entering Martian orbit in September 1999.
1999 U.S. launches Mars Polar Lander. Contact lost with lander during descent in December 1999. Two microprobes "hitchhiking" on lander also fail.
2001 U.S. launches Mars Odyssey. Orbiter reaches Mars in October 2001 to detect water and shallow buried ice and study the environment. It can also act as a communications relay for future Mars landers.
2003 European Space Agency launches Mars Express. Orbiter and lander to arrive at Mars in December 2003.
2003 U.S. launches Mars Expedition Rovers. Spirit and Opportunity rovers due to land on Mars in January 2004.
It was on the front page of http://news.bbc.co.uk/ but is not now.
It seems to have been pushed off the front page into the science/nature page by explosions in Pakistan and China. The UK has historic links with India/Pakistan (and a number of UK'ians have family links in Paikistan) so this was perhaps deemed more pressing. I know the Beagle probe means more to you and me, but not everyone is a nerd.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
because their country uses metric units!
* The Soviet Union used metric units, and all of their probes failed except one. So did the '96 Russian mission.
* The Customary-using U.S.'s Mariner 4, 6, 7, and 9 worked, as did Viking 1 and 2, and Mars Observer; only Mariner 3 of the Mars missions failed.
* The U.S. Federal Government most far-reaching metrification laws went into effect after Observer was launched, and things have been 50-50 since, reflecting the semi-converted state of the U.S.
Obviously, there is a direct correlation between societal use of metric units and failure of Mars missions! If we are to explore the Red Planet, we must de-metrify now!
Fact is: if we keep crashing stuff into Mars, they are going to get pissed off eventually and launch a WAR ON TERROR. They will bring their fleets of ships to Earth to hunt out the terrorist leaders responsible; capture them and then broadcast the medical examination (different orifice though)... as a warning to others.
michael, not to nitpick on the slightly altered headline, but the "Beagle 2 Probe Lands" is little inaccurate. They just don't know if it landed - that's why they are hoping to receve the landing confirmation signal.
From the article:
Well, I suppose that could be considered a landing of sorts. :)
And, find out here what options they have to communicate with beagle
Beagle 2's official site.
Space.com's Mars Rover section.
European Space Agency's Mars Express website.
Long ago and far away, while I was in college full time (Cal Poly Pomona) I payed for it by working full time swing shift at the Perkin Elmer plant in Pomona, California. As an environmental test technician, I got to see designed and built the mass spectrometer which was used in the Viking Landers, which successfully landed on Mars, and which worked when they arrived.
The thing which stands out about these old birds (this was the mid-1970s, mind you) is that they were very rugged, and very simple electronically, by our standards. Most of the electronics were analog, and the electronic technologies used were huge, robust, massive pieces of silicon - by today's standards. The components were all tested beyond all reason, the modules were tested just as hard, and the final assemblies were tested more so. It cost a fortune - but it did work when it got there.
Mars is a hard target. We know that now, and it has become apparent that the statistics speak against getting there on the cheap.
Faster, better, cheaper - which two did you want?
Soli Deo Gloria
all these bad jokes about martians etc... yawn Remember, people, the first contact through Odyssey was considered a bit of a long shot... it should have been successful but it wasn't a sure thing. there are 6 more communications attempts programmed into Beagle 2, and Mars Express (the orbiter) was successful. the next communications attempt is in a bit under 7 hours. it's VERY possible that Beagle 2 is just at a funny angle or still charging from the solar panels in order to communicate. Let's not jump straight to 'major failure' etc.
Pardon we while I dissent with the group claiming that this failure (if it indeed it gets confirmed to be a failure) is one that is part and parcel of a complex engineering endeavour. From one of the links in an earlier /. story :
The consequence of such a failure? Loss of spacecraft. Workaround? None mentioned. How can one trust the weather on Mars when the weather on earth isnt that predictable either? More stuff :
Consequence of this problem : loss of spacecraft. Workaround : none mentioned.
I come from the software world, and we call this as shipping with severity 1 defects. That is - there exists a defect in a product that can compromise its mission and there exists no work around for the defect. If you spend x dollars on a widget and a sev 1 defect is triggered, your $x is gone to that mystical money bucket in the sky.
I'm not assigning blame to any one particular group - they all contributed. Undoubtedly, sev 1 problems could have been addressed had a bigger budget been available. So in that sense, it is a problem that originated in the funding and management channels. On the other hand, the engineers who ship with sev 1 defects also have a responsibility to make sure that the funders understand that the existence of sev 1 defects can lead to a total waste of time and money. It might even have been better to not make the attempt.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Folks,
I think what may have happened to Beagle 2 was that it may have been damaged by the dust storms that are occurring on the planet right now.
Does anyone remember the Mars 3 probe the Soviets launched in the early 1970's? It had the unfortunate experience of trying to put a lander on Mars in a completely automated manner right in the middle of one of the worst planet-wide dust storms to hit the planet and the probe never functioned properly after landing. We were very fortunate that the two Viking landers and Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars during periods of benign weather on the planet.
Because these dust storms can last for three to five months, I do have major concerns that the two upcoming NASA landers may suffer the same fate as Beagle 2--trying to land in a major dust storm. =(
(By the way, one of reasons why the two Viking landers succeeded was that they stay attached to the Viking orbiter until after orbit insertion. That allowed NASA engineers to carefully look at landing sites with the orbiter cameras to find a safe landing spot. If Mars Express had been designed this way they probably would have not allowed Beagle 2 to land until the dust storms on the planet subsided.)
I'm assuming the Beagle2 made it to the surface but was unlucky in where it landed. If the Beagle had landed at an akward angle, unable to open it's solar array- wouldn't the Martian wind eventually move it around? It only weighs 160 pounds or so, and the avg winds on Mars is about 20mph but gets up to 60 often and in the 100's during storms. I'm sure a fail-safe was included in the plan in the event the Lander couldn't open-RIGHT?? Are the batteries required to open the panels.. or do they spring? If they spring open the mission can be started then! On another note ... I bet NASA is considering changing the landing position of one of the US rovers to rendezvous with the Beagle2. That would be awesome! Don't give up!
Amazingly enough, Google gives me 11,800 pages for Theroy .
But "the Roy" gets me 66,100, and the first is a great artist with a really lousy web site.
"Art Bell" returns only 56,600.
Could take a while to read them all, theroetically.
This Like That - fun with words!
Two things:
1) The delta-V to get to Venus is much less than to go to Mars. Results is less acceleration load on the probes, also Venus has a much denser atmosphere so that aerodynamic drag devices (drogue chutes, main chutes) are much more effective in controlling touchdown velocity.
2) The thermal cycle of daily heating/cooling is less extreme on Venus than on Mars. Yes, you do have pressure to worry about on Venus... but the thermal cycle is what beats the hell out of electrical connections.
(Note that two of the three successful Mars landers used retrorockets (Viking I & Viking II)... so Beagle was really treadding a very recently blazed trail by using Pathfinder's airbag landing.)
--Rob
If the missions in the seventies were made using 1960's technology, then it's a fair bet to suggest that a mission in 2003 might be based on 1980's technology (just.)
Now, look at Britain in the 1980s: The Sinclair QL. Rover. Jaguar. Lucas.
Is anyone surprised? ;-)
(Disclaimer - this is not a troll, I'm British, it's a funny. This is just typical British cynicism. So if you're American and thinking of modding this down because you think I'm being mean to Brits, honestly, I'm not.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
IAAAE (I am an Aerospace Engineer.)
Martian dust storms are not the big deal many people imagine they are. We're used to hurricanes, able to generate winds so strong that people are literally blown off their feet. And a few months ago we heard soldiers describe sandstorms in Iraq, where grains of sand are whipped against your skin so hard that it stings like hell.
On Mars however, the atmosphere is so thin that storm effects are quite different. The dust raised by these storms consists of tiny talcum-powder-sized particles. These thin winds would never have the "oomph" to pick up a grain of sand.
And a "raging" 150 mph wind on Mars would not be able to knock a person on his or her butt. It would only carry as much force as a relatively gentle 18 mph Earth wind.
The only possible ill-effect from a dust storm, is that a thin layer of dust might coat the lander's solar panel and reduce its efficiency by a few percent. (Not enough to prevent the lander from phoning home, though.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
But Russians sent two missions to Mars satellite and both failed. The second one failed in a mysterious way: read here http://www.skiesare.demon.co.uk/phob-3.htm or search with google for other articles.
They must have sent it by USPS because we never got it.
::-P
Do you have a shipping number we can track?
-- taking over the world, we are.
Even if a confirmation of the failure of Beagle 2 would be a huge disappointment, we have to keep in mind that Mars Express has successfully swooped into Mars' orbit.
And even if the most spectacular experiments were to be conducted by Beagle 2, Mars Express carries numerous instruments :
A sub-surface sounding radar which could be used to find ice under the surface,
a high resolution stereo camera to analyse further the topology of Mars,
visible, infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers to analyse the composition of the surface and the atmosphere,
and an "Energetic Neutral Atoms Analyser" to quantify the interactions between solar winds and martian atmosphere.
Rejoice ! We and scientists will still get our christmas present !
This comment is printed on 100% recycled electrons.
This is kind of misleading. Of the 30 total missions to Mars, only nine were attempted landers. THis gives a lander failulre rate of 1/3 instead of 1/10, which BBC implies. The other 21 craft were orbiters and the like.
On a further note, I felt BBC did indulge in nationalistic bias as of yesterday, which people in Slashdot previously praised them of not doing with this story. Firstly, there's the misleading lander success rate above. They also compared to the successful US missions, calling them costly and implying wasteful. Although now that they cannot get a signal from the craft they took this bit out of the story.
This is misleading because the two Viking landers were built decades ago using even older technology. The more recent Mars Pathfinder event was, however, on a cheaper budget, part of a Nasa Discovery Mission, which built/tested the craft for 150 million. This approach included researching the parachute/airbag landing, which the Beagle 2 was able to imitate. ALso, comparing the cost of building a rover (Pathfinder) vs. a robot arm (Beagle) isnt' fair as a rover is much more complex.
On a different note, all hope is not lost yet. There are still banks of receiver antennas in case the Beagle's antenna is pointing the wrong way such that NASA's Mars Odyssey craft couldn't pick it up.
make world, not war
How long before we see another one of these landers for sale , dirt cheap, on eBay (Buyer must arrange their own shipping) ?
If you don't understand anything I post, please accept that I ate paste as a small boy...
Well,
... about the touch down we do not know so far. The reason is: the first craft able to pick up Beagel hail signal "by chance" was Mars Odyssey. Mars Odyssey did not pick up a signal.
.. finally .. it is in survey orbit for Mars and in a regular contact with Beagle.
likely BBC exagerate or the story poster did.
Beagle has entered the atmossphere
Thats what we know.
So. The plan is that Mars Express, the mothership of Beagel, will make contact to Beagle TODAY -- not 20 hours before!! -- around 22:40 GMT. After 22:40 GMT we will know if Beagle touched down successfully.
For more information look at: www.esa.int, and follow the link to the web stream http://esa.capcave.com/esa/marsexpress/
However, making contact to Beagle is not the primary goal right now. Mars express is supposed to perform two important manouvers first: Appogee reduction(currently we are in a 10 day orbit), to get the orbit more circular instead of a high ellipse, and second: an orbit inclination change manouver to get the currently equatorial orbit inot a polar orbit.
Its well possible(I dont know the orbit data) that after the orbit is polar it will take several days until Mars Express is in an orbit position to pick up Beagels signals.
After the craft is in polar orbit, it will do about 9 further manouvers to reduce its 100,000 km orbit into a 11,000 km orbit. Then
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.