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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. ;-)
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!
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!"
Martians should be confused with so much robots incoming.
Their thoughts must be:
Regards and happy 2004!!!.
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.
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
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