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Jodrell Bank Telescope Gets No Signal From Beagle
tipiyano writes "Continuing the story of Beagle 2 from earlier today it seems like the hope for Beagle 2 surviving the landing at Mars is reducing as the Jodrell Bank telescope didn't receive any signal from Beagle. In the words of a mission manager, 'I wasn't too worried about the missed link with Odyssey, but it starts getting serious if Jodrell Bank cannot get a signal either'."
From the article, Beagle is only broadcasting a 5 watt signal. Quick calculation..5 watts power output with a free space path loss of ~200db means that the amount of power reaching the Lovell dish is roughly 1/5x10^-66 of a watt.. I'm blown away that they are able to pick that out of the backgound noise at all.
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Free Space path loss
Nifty WLAN link calculator
OK, I found a reference to this at the BBC website. Sounds like they tested them to some degree, but maybe not as much as they would have liked. If that's the case, they probably figured the airbags would work and assigned it a risk rating (baseline/low/low-medium/medium) and continued. Since Mars missions have a very narrow launch window, they likely needed to make a decision whether to delay the mission for 2+ years, or to launch without a complete testing regimen. If that's what happened, it's a tough call, not necessarily an indictment of the program management.