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Holding On To Hope For Beagle 2
slasher999 writes "Scientists are still keeping their hopes up that they will be able to revive Beagle via the Mars Express mothership on 4 January. On that date the ship will be in the correct orbit and may then be able to revive the lander. Current theroies as to what may have gone wrong include the possibility that the landers on-board clock is incorrect and that the lander has been transmitting at incorrect times. Funny, I thought I heard that as of yesterday the batteries on the lander would have been depleted unless the lander had received an order to recharge its batteries."
Who builds a space probe that needs to be TOLD when it needs to recharge? I mean, isn't that something that you'd really, really want to automate? Considering we're, you know, a few billion kilometres away...
When life gives you lemons, you CLONE those lemons, and make SUPER-LEMONS. -- Dr. Cinnamon Scudworth, Ph.D
I agree with one of the previous posts. With unsuccessful missions like these before, wouldn't they program the lander to do something like...
if (batteries == 0) { recharge(); }
Maybe I'm missing something?
Funny, I thought I heard that as of yesterday the batteries on the lander would have been depleted unless the lander had received an order to recharge its batteries. :)
God, I hope not. That would possibly be one of the stupidest design flaws I have heard of in a long time. Why can't it just charge its batteries whenever the sun is shining? That said, maybe the onboard clock is in American time and not Metric time
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Crudely Drawn Games
That's a heck of a ping time to compensate for.
"Never let your emotions get tangled up with something as silly as a space probe. It isn't healthy. So Beagle 2 fails. Big whoop. Deal with it and move on."
I guess I'm "unhealthy" then. So be it.
Beagle 2 was more than a "silly space probe". Like all of our other space probes meant to do basic exploratory science, which are our civilizations very first infant steps into the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos, Beagle was alive. It was alive with the hope of the scientist who spent months designing and refining a tiny instrument aboard its manipulator arm that just maybe, this instrument after travelling millions of miles might detect the faintest trace of life, the first on a planet outside of our own. It was alive with the wonder of all the schoolkid geeks who followed the program in their classrooms that maybe someday they might be the first person to step off of a lander into a fine red dust and look out upon stark desolate vistas of the first planet humans visit outside of their own. And it was alive with the excitement of all the rest of us who followed the mission, who rooted for the underdog and thought of the possibilities that await us in the cold inky depths of space.
So maybe I'm just being "silly" but I think only beasts could remain indifferent to the nature of the universe which created them. And even though Beagle2 would have only revealed to us a tiny fraction of a dot of that universe, it likely would have increased our understanding of it by thousands of times.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Why don't people keep uncoroborated opinions out of story blurbs? Now we've got pages and pages of
One mourns the loss of his work, and the things it could have done much as a mother would mourn a killed child. It represents the extinguishing of all the hopes and dreams of that which one put a lot of personal effort into creating.
I understand, and mourn also. Beagle is Earth's child, sent for exploration, to go where we yet cannot reach or see. With the news of Beagle's problems comes the extinguishing of all the hopes and excitement of the discovery of new things Beagle was to uncover for us.
Hopefully, we learn what we did wrong, pick up, and try again. Space is a harsh mistress.
My condolences to the Scientists, Engineers, and Constructors of Beagle. My hope is that you do not become discouraged; rather learn all you can from what happened so you can try again.
Anubi.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
While there is even a remote chance that it may be functional, it would be foolish to give up.
The unit conversion was a mistake of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories), a part of NASA that works strictly on unmanned spacecraft.
The Beagle II is a product of the ESA. They are quite different.
While I agree that the conversion was a silly mistake to make, you really have to appreciate how staggeringly complex the undertaking of an unmanned (or manned, in fact) space flight can be. I have three relatives that work for JPL, none of which were on the team that made the error, but they all share the shame. After seeing a small part of what is involved from them, I:
1) Am glad that I do not work for NASA, and
2) Am frankly mystified that, seeing as how we are all human, any successful automated probe missions have been accomplished at all. There is just so much that has to be done *perfectly* to have any hope of even getting off the earth, let alone circling planets at precisely calculated trajectories to gather a specific "amount" of inertia to be able to get to a specific spot over a specific planet so as to be able to exercise a specific number of steps at the exact correct time in the correct order.
Complexity-wise, it is not unlike having to build a mature mission-critical operating system in five years, which has no significant bugs and whose problems are often more difficult to solve.
While it is sometimes fun to make fun of the mistakes of others, I can do no less than stand in awe of how much NASA and the ESA get accomplished with what they have. The ESA in particular, if you compare the Beagle's budget to that of, say, the Galileo project.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
If we can hear a signal of a fraction of a billionth of a watt from one of the Voyager probes, then we'll certainly hear a 5 watt signal from Mars.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
While there's still hope for Beagle2 until mothership Mars-Express starts listening from jan 4 on, let's not forget that Mars-Express itself is the main instrument here. As was stated before , Beagle2 was decided as an add-on late in the process of developing Mars-Express. Maybe (and if so sadly) Beagle2 is lost but Mars-Express seems to be very much alive and has the potential to send us loads of surface and sub-surface pictures of Mars. Scientists put 6 years in the development of Beagle2, but how many manyears were spend to Mars-Express? I bet much more than 6 years ...
less is more
That's a very long shot. The scientists are hoping that this is the cause of the problem, as it could be corrected from the mothership. But this is just the most utterly pathetic wishful thinking.
Most likely, the dumping baloons (whatever they are called) have failed, as a previously tested version of these ballons has failed. Apparently, these dumpers haven't been even tested before launch.
Sigged!
That said let's face facts, Beagle 2 is dead. :-)
I respectfull dissagree. As several posters pointed out, neither Mars Odysse nor Jodrell Bank Observatory are primaryly intended to communicate with Beagel 2. Both where only "tries" to pick up Beagles hail signal -- by chance --, and where in no way ment to "communicate" with Beagle.
The mother ship of beagel, Mars Express, will -- as several posters have pointed out -- manage to get into a low (11,000km) polar orbit until january the 4th. Then finally, Mars Express will be in dayly communicatin with Beagle. And tehn finally we can start to wory when we can not make contact.
Currently everything is running after plan, and its absolutely nothing wrong. Look at: http://www.esa.int
angel'o'sphere
Well, if I was british I surely would place a bet. And my bet would be: we will make contact, Beagle 2 lives.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Technology has evolved but the budgets & timescales have shrunk. Beagle 2 was launched on a budget of about 25 million UKP (40 million Euro) and was concieved, constricted & launched within a few years. The NASA probes the 70's took twice as long and almost as much money before you even factor in inflation You can do many more Beagle 2's than you could Vikings for the same amount of cash.
Seeing as how any modern CPU's clock is so far above the frequency of TV channels 3-4-5, I really doubt you're seeing harmonics of that clock!
You're seeing any number of other things, like memory accesses, support chips, etc...
And really, a clock in itself is only a carrier, and has no information in it, it could only interfere by 'fm capture', meaning you'd lose the sound if your clock happened to be at the right frequency.
"The Dish", as Stanford's radio telescope is commonly known, is said, theoretically, to be capable of detecting radio emissions from Beagle 2's central processor microchip.
Wow.