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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."
"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."
:)
Or maybe they're using kilos as their base time unit.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
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
That's what they get for not using ntpd. ;-)
picked a better band tha Blur to write a song for them? I mean....
Okay, of all the space projects I guess I could expect a silly human error hiccup...but just one, and it's really silly.
So, now we see the next project, they ask for more millions of dollars for experts and high tech equipment, and oops - this time we forgot to set that pesky clock!
Wait a minute, I think I see a pattern here....
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?
- deal with the inevitable.
- grieve for your loss.
- move on.
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.Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I don't understand how the iPod is related to the clock being stupid, but come on.. If you were trying to cut costs you'd be doing it with an elCheapo brand player, not one of the most expensive ones on the market.
You guys must realize that neither the Odyssey nor Earth-based radio telescopes were tested with the Beagle 2. Only the Mars Express orbiter was specifically designed and tested to communicate with the lander.
A blog like any other.
1. Tell Starbuck's that the Martian Coffee market is untapped.
2. Tell them the best location for coffee sales is the landing site of the Beagle 2
3. Wait the 2 weeks for them to build the store
4. Order a tall latte and 1 hour of wi-fi
5. Connect to the beagle 2 using your local wi-fi
6. Drink your latte
This would cost the EU goverments about $7 (for the latte and 1 hour wi-fi) and they get a latte out of the deal!
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
The BBC article seems to imply that Beagle will use solar power to transmit a signal. Perhaps as a fallback if the batteries have failed?
The lander would need to open and expose it's solar panels within a few days to recharge the batteries. It should do this automatically.
The most recent BBC Article seems to have the illustrious Professor Colin assuming the best: The Beagle's got a 42-cell Lithium Ion power source, so assuming that was previously charged (why wouldn't it be?!) then it should last for some decent amount of time. That being said, transmitting continuously for 12+ hours a day doesn't bode well if the probe never got the message to unfold its solar panels (shouldn't that have been the next step after the airbags deflated?!)!
If you post, they will mod it.
It is programmed to recharge them automatically...if the solar arrays properly opened. That said let's face facts, Beagle 2 is dead. And despite all the insipid 'pfft it was British what do you expect' jokes already posted to this story, I think this result should be marked as a very dissapointing and unfortunate outcome. Think of the scientists who have spent the past ~6 years of their lives working on this project (Collin Pillinger being the most notable). This must be positively crushing for them. The engineering on the lander was absolutely incredible, look at the design of the instruments Beagle2 carried, some of them are downright elegant; a tiny single chip radiation detector, a hot thin film wind speed and direction monitor, a fully functional gas chromatograph that could nearly fit in your hand, there is a dust sensor, UV sensors, microscope with multispectral LED illumination, a mossbauer spectrometer, an atmospheric gas oxidation sensor little more than a centimeter across, a subsurface burrowing mole, pressure and temperature sensors, and a high resolution CCD camera.
Contrast this with the NASA Mars Rovers' 3 experiments and the fact that all the science on Beagle2 had to be squeezed into less than ~100 Lb. while the Rovers weigh 10X that and there's no denying the unbelievable effort that the scientists and engineers must have put into its assembly.
This is a sad day for science that could have been, but also a testament to what could be done given limited resources and a small budget.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Sorry, but what`s this story about ? I`ve heard somebody called Colin Pillinger has lost his beagle. Look, I`m a animal lover but it`s just a bloody dog. It`s probably just hopped over the wall is is humping the neighbour`s poodle. Do we really have to have constant new reports about this ?
My advice to Colin is stop making such a fuss and go and stick some "Lost Dog" posters up on nearby lamp-posts like everybody else.
That said, I agree, it's a massive bummer. I was really hoping that this current crop of Mars probes would all succeed.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
I believe the Beagle team is firmly in stage 1 but after this quote, "At the moment, I am frustrated rather than concerned." some are already drifting into stage 2.
Martians should be confused with so much robots incoming.
Their thoughts must be:
Regards and happy 2004!!!.
Why don't people keep uncoroborated opinions out of story blurbs? Now we've got pages and pages of
Perhaps they didn't know how to program the clock, and left it flashing 12:00, like my dad's VCR.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
This is ridiculous, and I for one cannot believe that Prof. Pillinger keeps saying it.
Unlike the NASA orbiter, which might conceivably not be able to understand the Beagle's transmission, Jodrell Bank is looking for its radio carrier (i.e., just for the existence of a transmission at all). It should be able to see it. That's what radio telescopes do, after all - and Jodrell Bank has been looking at space probes since the 1960's.
Moreover, all of Mars is well within a Jodrell Bank beamwidth at 500 MHz, so it doesn't matter where the thing is on Mars - Jodrell Bank should see it. And it's too much to believe that operators at Jodrell Bank, Westerbork and Stanford all screwed up such a simple measurement.
This spacecraft is almost certainly lost; I would rate it's chance of recovery at much less than one per cent.
While there is even a remote chance that it may be functional, it would be foolish to give up.
First of all, it's ESA, not NASA. Second, yes, it is automatic.
Li-Ion Battery replacement : $99.00
Milage charge ( > 50 miles from nearest repair depot):
$.45/mi * 250,000,000mi: $112,500,000
total: $112,500,099 + VAT.
Note: Although this would make the repair charge more expensive than the entire incremental charges for the beagle-2 mission, it would still be the cheapest way to fund for a manned mars mission.
Unfortunately, I'm betting that they didn't contract for an extended warranty for this thing. This was done on the cheap, you know.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
maybe they should just have paid the damn $400 for OnStar..
Ummm, err, say what, now?
250 Million miles and only one try to get it right.... Although I envy the opportunity to make the attempt, I don't envy the need for near perfection.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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
It's display is probably flashing 12:00.
First, the facts from the Planetary Society:o ns.html
o rm.html
http://www.planetary.org/learn/missions/marsmissi
I saw this one in a comment the other day to a related article... Not sure I believe it myself but some of the pictures and points raised are interesting nonetheless...
http://yorkshireufoinfo.homestead.com/PhobosPlatf
They picked Blur to write the callsign.
The computer died of shame.
siggy played guitar
Speak for yourself. I think my human manufacturing tool is very special.
Beware blue cats moving at
I listened to the daily brefing yesterday, and the comms expert did say that during a brainstorming session, someone came up with the idea that the Stanford dish could "possibly" detect the EM radiation emmissions of the onboard CPU, but that it was just a working theory and that before they throw in the towel, they'd try it. But, by no means was this anything to hang their hopes on.
They thinking is, the Stanford radiotelescope is so sensative, that detecting small changes in EMR millions of light years away compared to a few million miles...that maybe they could detect it even with the shielding. They also stated it would not be in "real time" and that they would have to scrub the data to see if they can detect a signal 'a la Seti@Home
WTF? Over?
I see my own all the time! You see, I have a TV in the next room still on rabbit ears. When I turn my computer on, channels 2, 4, and 5 become virtually unwatchable because of the processor clock harmonics being emitted in the TV channel spectrum.
Believe me, you might be surprised how much muss and fuss manufacturers go through to make sure they don't emit more EMI than some legal limit, much like auto manufacturers go through the hoops trying to minimize emissions.
The trick they are apt to use on Mars is to use several antennas at the same time to lock into the unit on Mars. Sure, there is a lot of ambient noises, and thats why the multiple antennas - you know exactly what phase delays as the signal arrives at each antenna to expect ( beamformer ). You only pay attention to the signals which arrive at the proper delays to each antenna. Being you know what the processor loop on Mars is doing, you can correlate against that same pattern . When you get correlation to that pattern showing up at the correct time displacements to each antenna, bingo. The unit on Mars is the only one that could emit the signal such that the constraints on the digital filters at the receivers here on Earth are met.
I am not on the team to do this, I am speculating on how I would attempt to do so. I do know computers are terribly noisy in the RF area, and because they emit a peculiar recognizable racket in the RF spectrum in an area that is by nature pretty quiet, it should be "relatively" easy to find. Especially one hung in a tight loop.
If you browse around for "pseudorandom noise generators", also known as "linear feedback shift registers", you will see a lot of tie-ins to "spread spectrum" communications, with technologies for digging signals out of the noise by taking advantage of correlation to known patterns.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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!
Basically, if Beagle 2 doesn't wake up and start singing, we will probably never know why.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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.
oh dear, some facts...
firstly, beagle2 charges its batteries automatically.
secondly, the airbag did fail its first tests, but it did pass its final test (there was not enough time to test further).
sources? the bbc - they made a great 2 part documentary which followed beagle2 from genesis to launch.
IANARS (rocket scientist) but speaking from pure computer scientist's perspective (or any kind of scientist's perspective, as a matter of fact), it is essential to have as much feedback as possible exactly at critical times like that when things break. It may not prevent the failure of the system the first time, but will give us the necessary info to tell what went wrong and design around it the next time.
So, wouldn't it be wise to design a descent phase with no communication blackout?
The only reason I can fathom why this is not done yet, is that it is really hard and/or expensive. Transmitting info to Earth may be difficult, because it must drain too much power and (in my understanding) the initial phase of the descent actually happens on the back side of Mars (as viewed from Earth).
However, now that we have an orbitting satellite around Mars, would it be so hard to time the probe's landing so that its transmissions of its status are picked up by the Mars Odissey which can then safely retransmit them back to Earth at its leisure? Does any one know if this is feasible at all?
Q. Why do the British drink their beer warm?
A. Because Lucas makes refrigerators.
Q. What are the settings on Lucas headlight switches?
A. Dim, Flicker and Off.
"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.