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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. ;-)
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?
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 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!"
If you post, they will mod it.
"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!"
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.
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]
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.
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
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.
The craft was made against all odds on a shoestring budget, in record time, and within crazy weight limits. Because of the weight constraints several backup and/or extra communications systems could not be added. Anyone who compares this lander to Pathfinder, the MER's, or any other NASA project is out of his mind...
karma capped
Speak for yourself. I think my human manufacturing tool is very special.
Beware blue cats moving at
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!
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.
design a half-assed re-entry method that is unproven
The Mars Pathfinder mission proved that a drag parachute plus impact absorbing air bag are effective mechanisms for touching down safely on mars.
without any type of backup.
What space vehicle to planetary atmospheric insertion system has ever been designed with a backup? When things go wrong during insertion, the result has always been loss of the vehicle. Even for vehicles whose precious cargo is living, breathing, humans.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)