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Mars Crater Theory Tries To Explain Missing Beagle
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."
Kiss it goodbye, wait for the next one.
Manhours are better spent in the future, rather than the past.
Assuming a circular crater, the cross-section of hitting this crater would be 2%.
Bad, bad luck.
The owls are not what they seem
Yes, because bacteria and other life forms that develop in extreme conditions can offer interesting information on how life develops. (As well as more practical uses in medicine, as they probably have some unique and hopefully applicable properties.)
by 'blew up' do you mean 'inflated' or 'exploded'? Your sentence changes meaning depending on which it is read as...
That said, We don't really have any option but to do high risk probes. If we were only willing to accept a 95% success probability we would never send a probe in the first place.
With our current level of technology, it is the hard way or not at all.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
or more likely, something went wrong during whatever sequence of actions the probe was supposed to follow, and the only theory involved is Murphy's law.
...
It sounds to me like these guys are trying to shift the blame away from the probe, and therefore from them. But really, why should they not admit it's a cockup? there's nothing wrong in admitting a Mars probe failed, it's already quite an achievement to send man-made things there, and it's understood that there are risks involved, and that there's a very real probability that the mission will fail. There's no shame in that.
These guys tried their best and it didn't work. It's not like they tried to hide their failure of clipping their toenails or something
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Now, my knowledge of astronomy and all related things extends about as far as "Look. The moon!", but if you can get shots of the crater like this, then how can the probe be "buried" in the crater so far as to not be able to communicate? We're lookin' right into it, there.
Was that photo from Earth? Was that photo from another probe? Do we never see that view from Earth?
Seems like the damn thing just broke. Admit it.
You know what?
Isn't the fact that they selected the landing site BEFORE noticing a 1km large crater an indication that they've got the cart before the horse? Perhaps they should try thouroughly mapping the planet from low orbit before landing on it!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
*cough*basicsofmaterialscience*cough*usebestmateri alsforjob*cough*
Although you're spot on about the airbags. Hell, the original pair blew up during pressure testing too!
But don't overestimate our geographical knowledge of Mars, or underestimate Mars' irregularity. Landing something in an unfamiliar, hostile atmosphere without complete knowlede of the landing zone is difficult. Just have a look at where the Mars Rover was meant to go and where it actually landed for a good idea of the uncertainties involved.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I think that eventually we will have to send people to Mars, not because of the scientific reasons but just to satisfy our curiosity about what actually happened to all these lost landers.
I don't think it would be cheaper to send people to find lost landers. Besides, it might start a domino effect where we have to send yet more people to find out what happened to the first group of people.
I think that probes need to send more telemetry as they are in the process of landing. I think the new rovers have done this to some extent because of the Polar Lander problems.
The telemetry could include altitude (from altimeter) and craft status (parachute opened, bag pressure, etc). True, that adds to the expense of the mission, but if the failure rate is high, it is worth it.
Table-ized A.I.
Sadly the Beagle team didn't have access to bottomless pits of money and didn't have any choice about the launch date.
They had a hard enough time raising the money ( themselves ) as it was. I am sure they tested the probe as thoroughly as they possibly could before it was launched.
That being the case it was a case of either give it a go with what they had or not give it a go at all.
Maybe with a high profile person such as yourself ( anonymous coward ) in charge this the whole thing would have been a roaring success, I guess we'll never know will we ?
I just want to chime in here a bit.
People have been saying NASA missions are much more costly than Beagle 2, and therefore NASA is wasteful (this was implied by BBC and later removed from articles after they couldn't contact the craft).
Pathfinder was a Discovery class mission, and had a budget of $250 million. This is about 4x Beagle's budget of $60 million.
If anybody wants to say NASA is wasteful by looking at those numbers, they must realize the following
- Beagle 2 made use of the parachute/airbag landing system that was tested and demonstrated by the Pathfinder team
- Pathfinder had an autonomous (ie, not controlled realtime by a human) rover while Beagle 2 has a robotic arm.
- Pathfinder (IIRC) had a high-gain antenna which could communicate w/ Earth while Beagle 2 only has low-gain antenna to communicate with Mars orbiting craft with small hopes of Earth receiver arrays of detecting the craft.
Beagle 2 may have been cheaper but that doesn't mean it was necessarily more efficiently planned. Pathfinder had more complicated tasks to conduct, and also had more rigorous testing, and thus cost more.It's just annoying to see BBC showing nationalistic bias and taking jabs at NASA when we should all really be working together in the exploration process. Especially in areas of science where nationalistic bias shouldn't exist at all.
Just my two cents.
make world, not war
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer:
It is highly likely that human beings as a species will outgrow the Earth's resources. At that point we can either enact draconian measures to limit reproduction, or more realistically, we can begin to reach out to other worlds. One added benefit of reaching out to other worlds is that it prevents the old "all your eggs in one basket" problem: If an asteroid takes out Earth or something, humanity gets wiped out. I'd like to keep the species going... I like humans.
With fava beans and a nice chianti.
Anyway, knowing more about the universe outside of this globe makes us better able to move beyond. For my money, the sooner, the better.
Ultimately space exploration is for the same cause as environmentalism to me: It's about our continued survival and growth as a species.
If we ever colonize this planet, we will have to clean our crap up from all over the place.
VENI, VIDI, VICI, DIXI
Well, could Beagle2 have been fried in the same solar flare event which finally did in the Japanese probe?
Was it possible to test Beagle2 for this while it was still attached to the ESA's Mars Express?
I have not seen any remarks about this in the mainstream media.
Am I just being dense?
If two-thirds of 34 missions ended in failure, wouldn't that mean there were 11 successful missions? How come Beagle 2 would only be the fourth successful one?
It must be that the first statistic is talking about all kinds of missions (including simple orbiters with no landing component) whilst the second is talking only about landers.
That being the case, only three out of the eleven successful missions included landers in the first place. I don't believe that as many as nine or ten landers have ever been sent to Mars. This suggests that the failure rate of the landers is not noticably different than the failure rate of relatively simple orbiters.
What that says to me that the problem is not so much the rigours of descent as of the difficulty of getting electronics and batteries to last throughout launch and the long trip to Mars. I'm betting that these failed landers were dead before they even hit the atmosphere.
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