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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.
How far away is the US probe from the beagle landing site? Could they send their own little explorer over to check out what happened?
Maybe the Rover can track the Beagle. Would it be able to do things like nudging or flipping the Beagle? Maybe it landed upside down, or on a slope.
The solarpanels might generate energy after some handeling. But can the Rover do that?
-- (:> jms cs.vu.nl (_) --"---
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
only country to attempt to go to the moon (russians never wanted to go, nor planned to go) sending shit out the solar system is nothing, u just push it, first to discover life on mars? we'll see...
The Russians planned and tried to go to the moon. But when we got there first, they gave out that story of "Nyah, we never wanted to go to that dirty ol' moon, anyhow!" (insert pout and kicking at the dirt). The soviet space program is well documented and the records have been declassified.
Sending stuff out of the solar system is not nothing. I mean there is the matter of escaping the gravity well of the sun. It requires some interesting physics.
Life on Mars, well, that is debatable. Scientists have claimed to find simple fossilized life in meteorites that were thought to have come from Mars, and there were I think at one time claims that there were were bacteria-like lifeforms on rocks that were brought back from Mars, but the jury is still out. ET has not shown up yet. Still these were NASA discoveries.
Actually, they are - at least in the context the parent poster meant. Blackbox recorders do, in fact, have a beacon signal that's emitted after a crash - so that the blackbox can be found. This is especially useful for crashes over water.
Beagle-2 then was in free-flight, from December 19th til December 25th. Thats 6 days of free flight with no way to really track Beagle-2 nor do anything about it if it were found to be off-course.
Usually a space probe is tracked via the radio signals that are sent to Earth. Speed and location are usually derived from measuring the Doppler effect on the radio singls. I haven't read anything to date about any methods the ESA was able to use after December 19th to verify that Beagle-2 was in the correct position for landing and all. I kept reading stuff saying that "Beagle-2 and Mars Express are now XXX kilometers away from each other", but I'm not sure how they deduced this other than calculating it based on the path and inclination that Beagle-2 *should have* been on. What if it started in an unexpected slow spin after release? What if its angle of attack was over the engineering limit?
Feel free to correct my knowledge if I am off-base here. I'm interested to know if/how ESA was able to contact Beagle-2 between Dec 19th and Dec 25th when it was in free flight.
It all boils down to: you build the best spacecraft that you can within budget and weight restraints, and hope for the best. Even if you build in a lot of redundancy, there is still chance of failure. At some point you need to decide what to do: take a chance, or lose science. I guess in the end different people will come to different conclusions on how much of a chance you're willing to take.
karma capped
...while playing a round of golf. Or hiking in a crater. Or retrieving a poorly aimed frisbee. Pausing, they'll see some badly eroded pile of something shiny, walk over to look at it closer, recall a paragraph from their early astrophysics lessons, and radio back to the colony base "Hey Rosco, wasn't it somewhere around here that Beagle2 was lost? Back in '03? Well it's not lost anymore."
Yes, I'm talking about humans on Mars, being casual and knocking about the place, kicking over rocks on a lazy day, sometime in my lifetime. It could be my son or daughter grown up. Or your own, or even yourself if you are young now. Keep that in mind today, it helps to take the edge off this sort of temporary setback.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
since I made this comment that got modded to hell and flamed and whatever else, lemme repond.
/. or much of anyplce i seem to go online, seems to be have a very anti-US flavo(u)r to it. Here we have a very good example of what the US does well. We have 2 of these things going to Mars, 1 has suceeded, one is due there later, we have that probe or whatever its called collect comet dust, then we have the ESA we a failed mission to Mars. So basically, we're not allowed to point out what we do well, even though everyone can point out all our failings?
Every article on
And also, what's wrong with competition? I like any type of game/sport whatever thats clean(where the rules are followed) and competitive. I think it's fun and I think the results are much better. Who do you play harder against, some stranger you've never met and will never see again, or your best friend whom will probably try and improve and beat you? Your best friend of course, because of competition, even if afterwards you go have a beer together and hardly think about it again. Personally, I'd love to see another space race minus the 10ks Nukes aimed at each other. Even though I'm sure every nuclear country has figured out how to nuke every other country.
So my response, and I cannot speak for anyone other than myself, is more in retaliation against all the anti-us stuff than being anti-europe.
The base station of the US pathefinder was photographed by the high resolution orbiter. It only filled a few pixels, so you had to stretch your imagination to believe the black and white pixels matche the orientation of the airbags and base respectively.
I think there was a weak attempt to locate the failed 1999 lander's parachute photographically. The high resolution camera can only see miniscule parts of the surface.
Perhaps NASA was counting on the wind to keep it reasonably clean for an extended period of time.
But I'm asking because I really don't know. Was this thing built to withstand a dust storm?
Damon,
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I've always thought that they should use a roll of cellophane, like you'd find on an overhead projector. Once the cellophane is dusty, you just roll out a fresh section.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
A little good natured ribbing between friends is all that. The pictures and the science were for the benefit of everyone, as it would be with any of the rovers.
It's a little sad, because Beagle landed in a different chunk of mars and likely had different instruments, but that's the nature of great risks. If it doesn't go perfect all that's left is total failure. The British dared to dared, and invested much skill in Beagle, and no doubt are learning lessons from the attempt. Maybe it will increase the likelyhood of sending a permenant satallite, or even a small constalation, for sureveying and communications purposes. Through a little transatlantic cooperation.
But the ribbing, it is all in jest, and we expect no less in return. It's not like the Europeans are really any different. Who hasn't seen a "Footbal vs Soccer vs American Football" spam-gasim?
So buck up, stiff upper lip all that gov'na'. Or cowboy the fuck up you little bitch, if you prefer American english. This Beagle came so close to success, it's, dare I say, likely the next will certainly achive it. With new and improved instruments no doubt.
... it is only that you guys take it to fanatical extremes.
Excesses are generally bad on my book.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Fair enough. The world as a whole is in a bit of a snit about America these days, it is true.
We're all feeling like George W. and his cronies want to make us their bitch, and nobody wants to bend down to get their soap just at the moment. People are in a pissy mood.
That being said, many Americans are spectacularly oversensitive about criticism. Listen man, if I say I don't like the current US stance towards the UN, or on Kyoto, or whatever, that doesn't mean I hate America. Sheesh, people need to get a grip.
We all felt disappointed at the loss of the Mars Polar Lander, saddened at Challenger and Columbia, and so on. All the same it's just so damn predictable that the moment another nation has a loss in space there will be some fucktard shrieking "USA! USA! Everybody who isn't from where I am sucks ass!" that when one actually sees it there's a tendency to just say "oh go to hell, yankee fuckwit", or something like that.
While the dye you mention is probably a joke, having a radioactive liquid that would spill on a catastrophic crash would be released. The dye would obviously not be visible at all, but we do have the technology to track radiation from quite a ways away...
"Never, never suspect the dreams within the dreams of dreaming children." ~The Amazon Quartet
Before digital electronics became practical, many launch vehicles and spacecraft used analog FDM systems for telemetry. Each telemetry parameter is connected to a VCO (voltage controlled oscillator), the VCOs are multiplexed together and used to modulate the transmitter. On the ground, the receiver output is fed into a bank of FM discriminators. The discriminator outputs can be used to drive strip-chart recorders, and fed to an ADC for computer processing. I think they still use it on some price-sensitive applications like weather balloons.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I realize that the beagle had a shoestring budget compared to NASA, but I don't understand is why no testing of the reentry system?
They just didn't have time.
The Beagle was a very late add-on, and not only a shoestring budget but it was also built very fast, if they'd thoroughly tested every system they would not have finished it by the time launch window closed.
Yeah, they are rocket scientists, but they are not successfull rocket scientists yet. NASA, the USAF, the Soviets, and the Chinese had their share of tests that malfunctioned spectacularly, but they learned and continued on.
As for you implying that the others had few failed missions early on and then "learned" to make them never blow again, well, frankly, that's bollocks. I don't need to reminder you that the two last NASA Mars missions before the current ones failed.
The Russians have a particularly earth (mars?)-shattering record of 14 failures to 16 missions, and even those two worked only partially and for a very short time.
There are some things you can learn from, but right now, the success of a cheap Mars mission is just as much dependent on pure old fashined luck as it is from anything else. And the combined success rate is fifty-fifty, if even that!
Continued on? Sure. What makes you think we don't continue on and try again?
And they probably did consult with Russians. And everyone else.
I reckon it was smashed to bits on landing. The Beagle 2 team had problems when testing one of the landing bags at a vacuum facility in the US; basically, the bags burst, and the team realised that they had to use a lower pressure and compromise on a few other items to save on weight. One compromise too far I think.
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