Slashdot Mirror
Still No Contact from Beagle 2
Many of you have submitted this, so this will be a condensing of the relevant information. WebfishUK writes: "The BBC has just released this story which announces the failure of the latest and possibly best chance to contact the British built Mars probe, Beagle 2. Given that Mars Express was designed to communicate with Beagle (unlike the earlier attempts with NASA's Mars Odyssey), this may indicate that something catastrophic has happened to Beagle 2." From Bromrrrrr: "[The]
ESA is reporting that the Mars Express, which everybody was hoping would be able to get through to the poor lost puppy, has failed its first attempt. 'We have not lost hope yet to contact Beagle 2, but we also know that it has landed on an unforgiving planet,' said David Southwood, ESA's Director of Science." and I-R-Baboon adds: "The Mars Express mothership from the EU passed 350 km over the intended landing site of the Beagle 2 hearing only silence. Although nothing was heard, hope has not been given up yet, as scientists will keep trying until February, with more passovers of the Beagle 2's landing site on January 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, and 14th." Additional updates can be obtained from the Beagle 2 homepage as well as from the ESA's homepage for the Mars Express. Here's hoping that the lander is only down, and not out.
why dont they include some sort of near-indestructible beacon that will send a signal in case of crash, so that orbiting probes can locate and photograph the crash site??
But it's down... and won't get up again. Let's just rejoice over the spirit pictures.... It is something, even if it wans't funded by our tax euros.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Although beagle failed, I would like to commend the ESA for attempting the mission on a shoe-string budget. Landing on Mars is no easy task as we have found through a few, shall we say mishaps. Also, let us not forget that Beagle 2 was only part of the mission. I do believe that Mars Express is operating as expected. So all and all, for a first mission on a tight budget and small timeframe, I think the ESA put on a good show and encourage them in their efforts to explore the universe.
The US succeeded where the EU did not
Yeah. Of course, it's totally unheard for an American space project to blow up, or fail completely because the scientists couldn't even manage to seperate metric measurements from imperial. Let's face it, the Beagle landed in a crater. Tragic, but it's not incompetence.
Feeling the need to declare your nation's superiority on Slashdot is quite the sign of insecurity.
I mean, do you think they intentionally build the signalling system to self-destruct on a crash landing, or what ?
There's a 73 Kg limit (including all the airbags, entry heat-shield, and the actual payload) for the entire mission, and you want to put in armoured (read: heavy) modules for when it all goes wrong ?
What purpose would this serve ? So we can now get a photo where the 6 white pixels (and I'm being *very* generous with the resolving power of the orbital cameras) are the lander. Whoosh. What now ? And to do that, we leave out the gas spectrometer, perhaps ?
I'm sure you're a clever individual, but there are also very clever people at mission control. They will have forgotten more about sending probes on a journey through the Solar System than you or I will ever know, and I really was a rocket scientist, albeit only for a few years (it doesn't pay well...) Engage brain before fingers...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The impression I'm getting is that, while it should be possible to photograph the crash site, there is not sufficient telemetry data to locate the crashed lander. All that's known is that it's probably within a huge area.
We have to keep in mind the scale. The landers are very small objects, compared to the angle and depth of focus of the cameras on the satellites, which are dealing with a *planetary* scale.
If you drop your watch in the grand canyon, do you think you'd ever find it?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I can only agree. I'm feeling a great joy over the Spirit and was personally in the IRC chat with various JPL guys for the coming thriller with the Spirit touchdown. It was great. Now, what did I see afterwards? "Yeah, we did it!" "Woohoo, I can't wait for the images?"
Noo, some americans can't do that. Many went:
"USA 1 - ESA 0" (even if ESA barely funded Beagle, relatively speaking), "Take that, Beagle!", etc...
I must say I left the channel with a bitter aftertaste. I wasn't really angry, but sad how we had such a great time before and how happy I were for the USA, and then get this thrown in my face. And now, yet again, by certain immature Slashdot visitors. I'm still amazed that USA has landed a vehicle on another world (even if it has happened before), but I just can't find words for the feelings some people have against the ESA and can't really understand why. Does everything have to be a competition? This isn't the cold war, NASA guys has personally expressed their concerns about the Beagle and tried to contact it, the B2 funders are friendly people struggling hard to rescue it... It just makes me sad that some people feel so strongly against other parts of the world.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
What is your definition of smart, then?
Oh, and I'll give kudos to the scientists... they clearly deserve it. But I can't rehire them. I'd like to know what politicians funded this so I can make sure they get hired again (or at least cast my vote). Anybody know?
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Erm, if someone on Slashdot (or any normal person) thought of this idea, do you really think they DIDN'T consider it?
I mean for the love of god, as someone already said, how can you call people who sent a semi-autonomous robot through space to land on another planet stupid? (Which might I add, entails strapping a machine with sensitive equipment onto a massive, giant, firework. It then has to survive extremely violent vibrations during launch, which involves igniting thousands and thousands of pounds of propellant. Then it needs to survive radation and other nasties out in space. Then it has to go through an atmosphere (a weaker one than ours, but an atmosphere nonetheless) and survive extreme heat buildup, only to have a parachute be released which produces a short burst of extreme G's (or whatever you'd get from a quick, violent slowdown, and I could be wrong, I just assume it would be pretty violent), and then, on top of all that, it could bounce on inflated airbags for miles until it finally comes to a rest near, if not on the target zone, unfolds, and then sends pictures and other data back to Earth? Yeah, they're stupid allright.)
Perhaps wipers would have scratched dust or the equivelant of sand across the solar panels worse than just the wind. Or maybe the wind is enough to keep them operating until other parts of the machine fail.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Ask 'em. Most people at NASA are happy to talk about their work. It's not generally classified, and there's no NDA. When the really obvious or cool stuff is prefaced with "Why didn't you..." the response is almost always "We thought about that, but we didn't have the -foo- budget". Where foo is time, money, materials, weight or space. Often there are lots of cool ideas and the end result is much more simple and less featureful... but the remaining features are rock solid and tested 20 times to Sunday.
Some features are also dropped because a team (sometimes in an outside company) couldn't deliver their package on deadline and fully tested. Each payload tends to have a couple dozen little projects each provided by some university. Sometimes when one project is trimmed, for structural or other reasons, a perfectly good project is also cut.
So there's lots of thought into these probes. An amazing amount. Pretty much anything that you think is stupid has been done for a reason, and the ultimate reason is "we didn't want the whole probe to fail, so we simplified it". It's a very expensive shot, and if the solar panels don't deploy because the mechanism was over-engineered and got brittle in space (cold + radiation), the whole project is dead.
Depending on where you live, NASA and JPL has a pretty good lecture circuit going, and they have speakers that really know their stuff... even the astronauts. They are incredibly conservative engineers, and it seems to me that they should be - even with very conservative engineering, keeping everything as simple and as tested as possible, they run into problems. On a shakedown cruise of a new battleship, they can dock back again if there's a problem... or just fix it at sea. NASA is using up massively complex systems that have to work the first time they are tested. And then the design is thrown away because tech (materials, computer and science knowledge) has advanced by the next time they shoot. Plus they are an open organization that works with hundreds of companies and universities and has to QA everything.
If it sounds like I'm awestruck by them, it's for a simple reason. Everytime I have ever talked to somebody from NASA or JPL about the details of space I have always been totally impressed by their operation.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien