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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
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?
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!"
Yes, because Europeans use SPECIAL radio waves, different from the ones the rest of the world uses, and they only fit inside European satellite dishes.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
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
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.
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
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.
Do you know how finely tuned the receivers are ? I do.
Typically your receiver has a (physical, not in-software) narrow-bandpass low-noise amplifier that is tuned to a minute section of the frequency spectrum (say 1MHz range), specifically because you're trying to find a needle in a haystack - a galactic haystack at that! It's a noisy place out there; to design for the specific case you need requires a lot of optimisation of that case versus everything else - it's not just like scanning up and down the range... if you are not spot-on the correct frequency at the correct time, you'll miss the signal.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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
So, during design, the only available method of communication would be Mars Express. It was already known that for several days after landing, MEX would not be in position to talk to the lander (due to the need to change its orbit from equatorial to polar).
Thus they had to plan for the lander to stay alive and healthy on its own for at least 10 days. That is why it was programmed to automatically recharge its batteries as soon as the solar panels were unfolded and the sun would appear.
karma capped
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.