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."

Comments

Remotely Revive it?

[mjuszczak]

How will the 'mothership' orbitting around Mars be able to "revive" the lander? If its batteries are depleted, isn't it missing something: electricity?

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?

Say what?

[Valar]

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 :)

Re:Healing the pain

[deglr6328]

"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.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Why don't people keep uncoroborated opinions out of story blurbs? Now we've got pages and pages of /. readers complaining about how this is a really stupid design; which it would be if it were true. What's more disturbing though is that people are willing to accept slasher999's word for it.

There's only one thing worse...

[duncan_entwisle]

There's only one thing worse than Beagle 2 crashing on Mars, and that would be Beagle 2 working on Mars and no one bothering to keep looking.

While there is even a remote chance that it may be functional, it would be foolish to give up.

Re:Nigerian scam anyone

[Sivar]

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.