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'."

Comments

Why space is expensive

[fname]

Well, this episode goes to show you why space programs cost so much. As a prior poster pointed, Beagle was much cheaper that Viking landers. The quote I saw was $1 billion for Viking and $62 million for Beagle, although that $62 million is a bit fictitious since it piggybacked a ride to Mars on Mars Express, so the real cost may have been higher.

But let's say it cost $200 million. Let's say the Brits managed to send 5 identical models 1 year apart, and 2 worked fine. Would anyone be celebrating 2 successful landers for the price of 1 Viking? Nope, instead there would be an outcry about how the space program wastes money by destroying 3 $200 million missions.

So what do the managers do? Well, NASA had a couple high-profile disasters and a couple resounding successes. Pathfinder got a lot of ink, but NASA was held up to a lot of ridicule for its failure of the failed trips. After skipping the 2001 window for flights to Mars, in 2003 NASA & JPL sent 2 very expensive (think $400-600 million each) landers to Mars. Hopefully, both will be successful. If both fail, it may indicate that they just got lucky with Pathfinder and airbags aren't the way to go.

Oh, why did they cost so much more than Pathfinder & Beagle (keeping in mind that $400-600 million includes launch, the trip to Mars, the craft itself & the management of the program)? I'm sure it's because things were checked more thoroughly, the JPL managers were more conservative, and every problem that came up was fully addressed.

On the other hand, APL seemed to have a fairly poor approach to system architecture, as can be seen by reading the NASA inquiry into the Contour mishap. The APL investigation fixed blame quickly without making a thorough investigation. The full report dug into the cause a lot more thoroughly & made a much more likely assessment,

The CONTOUR Board concludes that the probable proximate cause for loss of the CONTOUR spacecraft was overheating of the forward-end of the spacecraft due to base heating from the SRM exhaust plume. The CONTOUR SRM nozzle was embedded within the spacecraft to a greater degree than is typical (Fig. 3), and the resultant near-field effect of exhaust plume heating was not adequately accounted for in the design. Overheating may have caused substantial material weakening and structural degradation, which could have led to catastrophic dynamic instability.

So why is space expensive? Almost every spacecraft (as opposed to satellites or launch vehicle) is essentially designed for 1 or 2 time use, and all the parts need to work, and, as highlighted above, need to work well together. That requires real engineering work involving analysis, research, testing and comparison to heritage programs. If you want to go from 50% to 90% reliability, you probably triple your costs (at least).

I hope they find Beagle. But landing a complex science instrument on a distant planet is difficult, and occasional failure is to be expected. If someone figures out a way to do it very well & very cheap, these missions may become as routine as a satellite launch. Maybe it'll be NASA or the ESA or some small entrepreneur. Good luck to them all!

The icing and the cake

[mhw25]

According to the Beeb article,

Mars Express is the major part of the European mission - Beagle was a late add-on - and will search for water, ice and key chemicals buried under the Martian surface.

That is, the lander is not the be all and end all of the ESA mission. After all, Mars Express will be looking for the potential signs of the possibility life on Mars - buried water, ice and chemicals - on a planetwide scale . Beagle will only be a stationary point sampler. I'm finding it strange that all that is being shouted about is the smaller part of the mission probably failed, while the greater whole is more or less working as planned.

I'm not arguing that surface lander is not useful, just that it is not the main focus of this mission. We still have two shots at landers - and these are rovers, not stationary samplers, arriving soon:

Spirit, the first of NASA's identical robot explorers, is expected to land Jan. 3. Its sibling, Opportunity, is scheduled to settle on the opposite side of the planet January 24. CNN

Beagle2 is kind of like the icing on the cake. Even if we lost it, but with Mars Express working we can still have our cake and eat it.