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Mars Crater Theory Tries To Explain Missing Beagle

Posted by simoniker on from the put-face-on-mars'-eye-out dept.

JayBonci writes "CNN is running a piece regarding the failure of the Beagle Mars probe being possibly attributed to a crater landing. It's an interesting story about the variety of forensics being used to try and pick up on the lost craft."

4 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This crater... by aheath · · Score: 4, Informative

    The BBC News web site has a story with a picture of the crater.

  2. Re:Interesting... by BlewScreen · · Score: 5, Informative
    Interesting indeed...

    From this article:

    [The crater] was only revealed by close-up pictures of the site taken by another NASA orbiter, Mars Global Surveyor, minutes after the British probe was supposed to have landed last Thursday.

    "minutes after" ????

    here's a mapthat shows a couple (from really far away).

    Isidis Planitia is at the equator, 1/4 in from the right - there's a big crater under the "a", but you can see others...

    and here's a close-up

    The gray circular area on the right, in the middle, is the area in question - the crater you can see under the letter "a" in the previous map is the one that's just barely cut off on the right in this one... I think the one they think the probe is in is the one slightly north and about an inch to the west of that one.

    I'm not sure when these were taken, but I was looking at them back in the spring, so they've been up for a while, i.e., not since only "minutes after" the probe disappeared...

    AND, as you can see, it's very easy to tell that there are craters there - and I'm not even a scientist, nor do I have access to ALL the pix of mars...

    -bs

    --
    That that is is not that that is not. That that is not is not that that is.
  3. Photos of landing site by flug · · Score: 4, Informative

    This page has several photos of the landing site, showing the weather the day of the landing (it was fine) and also the famous "crater" within the landing zone: Beagle2 landing site photos

  4. Re:useless by Rimbo · · Score: 4, Informative
    According to Paul Ehlrich's 1968 book "The Population Bomb" we would of been eating each other by now for lack of food.


    What happened was twofold.

    1. Food production technology continued to improve.
    2. Several billion people were never born.

    And what's really happening is that we're getting better at distributing and producing food faster than we are at making babies. What's more, countries like China and India that have imposed reproduction limitations are, combined with a desire to have male children, going to see their populations plummet if the measures remain effective.

    Which is why I think the more effective argument isn't the population growth as much as the "all eggs in one basket" issue. Sure, the probability of getting hit by a large enough asteroid is small, but it only takes one...