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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.
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.
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.