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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'."
But what about the Beagle's problems? It's all alone on Mars and probably can't signal back it's existence.
Poor thing.
I have been pwned because my
1. The Europeans are as incompetent as the Americunts (naaaaaah!)
2. There is something on Mars which hates space probes!
Flight managers ... said they had narrowed Beagle-2's likely landing area to an ellipse just 30 kilometers wide and 5 kilometers long
Yes. All over that area.
The coolest voice ever.
for the Martian Air Defenses!
(Wonder if they buy their flying-saucer fuel from Halliburton?)
...why a human launch to Mars is not quite ready for prime time. This is very difficult to stomach, seeing how the scientists must be devistated. But it would be much worse if there were humans on the other end of the bad news. My hope now is that the US can get *both* of it's robots down on the surface to make up for this (probable) great loss to science.
-- "Technology is most likely to let you down when you need it most." (Montgomery's axiom)
The other failures did not involve airbags - Mars Observer was an orbiter that went silent some kind of problem with the thrusters is suspected to be the cause, but we'll never know for sure; Mars Climate Orbiter got crispy over the metric/imperial units mixup during aerobraking/orbit insertion; and Mars Polar Lander did, in fact, attempt a Viking-like powered descent and it's theorized that when the landing legs deployed and locked, they incorrectly signaled the guidance system that the craft had landed, and the engine cut off too early, and it fell from a height of some 50m.
Bush Lies On the Record.
From This guy from MetaFilter: It probably will fail.
The balloons used to cushion the fall were never tested. The original balloons failed testing and they didn't have time to test the replacements.
Wow! Sounds like the way to run a space program.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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.
Links
Free Space path loss
Nifty WLAN link calculator
Flurry of bets on life in Mars
5 .htm
Vijay Dutt
London,
Bookmakers in London were biting their nails with nervousness as Beagle 2 approached the touch down on Mars. On Tuesday Ladbrokes cut the odds on the mission discovering life there after a flurry of bets.
Ladbrokes received many large bets following successful separation of the lander from its mother ship, Mars Express, on Friday. Others too reportedly similar increase in number of bets.
Proof of life on Mars would leave the bookmaker liable for a huge payouts on wagers placed with them. Warren Lush, a Ladbrokes spokesman was quoted saying that odds on finding evidence of life on Mars were being reduced from 33-1 to 25-1 after facing a potential payout of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
He conceded that the odds did not represent the true odds on finding life on the planet but the price was shortened because of the liabilities of hundreds of thousands of pounds. " We first took money for Mars life on Mars back in 1969 and would be looking at a black hole in our accounts if Beagle 2 discovers something," the spokesman told the Times.
Colin Pillinger, professor of Planetary Sciences at the Open University and Beagle's lead scientist has not placed any bet. He feels it would be like insider trading.
Meanwhile, Sir Patrick Moore writing in the Mirror said we would know after a few hours if there is some form of life on Mars, 34,500,000 miles away from us. There are craters, old riverbeds, canyons, valleys and volcanoes, the Olympus Mars being three times higher than the Everest.
The scientists are agog with the expectation that signals from Beagle 2 could confirm life forms even if it was very lowly.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_507223,000
MoFscker
Bear in mind that they were not even sure that Jodrell Bank would be able to pick up the signal. This was only conjecture and has never been tested.
There is a window every day now to pick up a signal via NASA's Odyssey, and if for any reason that there is a problem with comms protocols between Beagle2 and Odyssey (this was never tested due to time constraints) then Mars Express will come online on Jan 4th 2004 which does know how to talk to Beagle2.
NASA Administrator: So, what the hell happened to our probe?
NASA Scientist: We think that it got sucked through a black hole and got seriously upgraded by omnipotent living machines. We'll probably see it again in several hundred years when it returns as an entity called B'agel that threatens to destroy the earth in it's question for knowledge. Hey, it could happen...
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
It is now official - Jordell Bank has confirmed: Beagle2 is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Mars exploration community when recently ESA confirmed that Beagle2 accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of chances for survival. Coming on the heels of the latest Jordell Bank signal analysis which plainly states that Beagle2 has lost radio contact, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Beagle2 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent radiotelescope comprehensive signal search.
You don't need to be a Aldrin to predict Beagle2's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Beagle2 faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Beagle2 because Beagle2 is dying. Things are looking very bad for Beagle2. As many of us are already aware, Beagle2 continues to lose power. Red dust covers it like a river of blood. The lander rover is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core systems. The sudden and unpleasant failures of long time rover systems of traction and cameras only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Beagle2 is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
All major surveys show that Beagle2 has steadily declined in survival chances. Beagle2 is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Beagle2 is to survive at all it will be among martian hobbyist junk collectors. Beagle2 continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Beagle2 is dead.
Fact: Beagle2 is dead
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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, 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!
s/s h/ sh/
Think of it in a positive way. It'll save a lot of money that otherwise would be spent analysing the signals and coming up with conclusive evidence that Mars has rocks on it.
Regards,
--
*Art
There is no reason to bash the Europeans as a whole as they like to do Americans. Comments I seem to remember... "if NASA would stop hurling probes like lawn darts they'd actually get somewhere", etc... Let's try to show the Europeans a little sympathy, and try to be humble about our own successes and failures.
ESA had to know it was going to be hard to pull off a Mars landing, two countries (US, Russia) with a hell of a lot more experience have had difficulty with the same task. A blow to thier pride, yes, but the results in my opinion were not unexpected.
No.
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.
It's really a weight issue. Beagle 2 is 68 Kilograms. The Viking landers were around 576 Kilograms, around 200 pounds of which was fuel. Beagle 2 was also done on a shoestring budget, which would have made it impossible to build and test custom engines (perhaps hydrazine monopropellant, as used on the Vikings). Furthermore, launch cost would have been increased as a result of the weight, not to mention further complicating the design of the Mars Express, upon which Beagle 2 hitched the ride. Again, we still don't know what happened, so to assume that the lander was damaged due to the bounces is pretty ridiculous. It could have been a million other single-point failures, as the lander had absolutely no redundancy whatsoever.
A blog like any other.
Try 1 for 1, not counting Beagle or the current Spirit and Opportunity probes.
;-)
Shh... don't jinx it. It'd be tragic to see Spirit crushed, and Opportunity lost.
Beagle 2 is 68 Kilograms. The Viking landers were around 576 Kilograms, around 200 pounds of which was fuel.
Dude, seriously don't mix up your units. We already crashed one over that.
There are a couple of competing factors with space probes:
1. No space probe is truly "cheap" - it costs millions of dollars to put together even the most rudimentary probe and launch it.
2. When figuring the probability of failure of a complex system you have to multiply the probabilities of the individual parts. So if you have 10 parts which all must work and they all have a 2% chance of failure then your overall probe has a 1-0.98^10 = 18% chance of failure. If you have 100 parts which all must work it is probably worth paying the extra million dollars to make them 99.999% reliable.
Somebody else pointed out that NASA/ESA/etc depend on PR for funding. As a result, it makes more sense to spend a billion dollars a mission with a 100% success rate than $30 million with a 50% success rate (people don't consider it a waste when the mission actually works - but the cheap probes are perceived as wasting $30 million every time they crash - even though on average they only cost $60 per successful mission).