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.
So do they just give up, or hope Spirit can eventually find it and give it a doggie biscuit?
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Damn, those martians shot down another one of our probes!
They have much better aim than, say, Saddam Hussein's SCUD missle launchers!
Hey, maybe Saddam hid his better weapons of mass destruction ON MARS!!!!!!!!!!!
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
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??
unlike the earlier attempts with NASA's Opportunity
That would be the Mars Odyssey, not Opportunity.
Their rover turned out to be a dog.....
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
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)
Retrieving the black box is going to be a *bitch* :)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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?
The 'Beagle 2' finally sent the first pictures and an explaination why it didn't sent earlier click here.
Dude, we're all humans, and we're all in this together. Your probe worked (wooyay), ours didn't. (doh)
There is such a thing as a bad winner you know.
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
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've been crossing my eyes at Nasa's Mars photos for half an hour and I still can't see a beagle!"
Dupe.
On the plus side, though, you're well on your way to becoming a Slashdot editor.
"Derp de derp."
Time for the rescue mission. This is the perfect opportunity to launch mankind's first Mission to Mars.
I mean, who wants to be the one responsible for leaving a beagle on Mars? Can you just imagine the commercials?
"Lost: Puppy on Red Planet. Will accept offers to build a multi-billion dollar spacecraft to retrieve him. Answers to the name Beagle. Please help him come home with your donation."
I'm telling you, if people fall for Nigerian and Viagra schemes, we can get them to finance this thing within 10 years. Maybe less, if we also target the people who buy penis enhancement pills.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I'd be real pissed at you earthlings dumping all your cruddy robots on my planet.
Mars is *not* a landfill!
Ruining our ecosystem with your trash!
Death to earth!
Where's the ka-boom?
...but we also know that it has landed on an unforgiving planet
Well now there's the problem -- next time we should just go to a forgiving planet instead. What were we thinking?
It was supposed to touch down in a certain area. A few minutes after it was supposed to touch down, they noticed a big, smoking crater. They're trying to figure out of the two are related.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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!
What's with you people and your Beagle jokes. Why haven't people realized yet (After we've been talking about this for weeks) that the MER landing sites are very far away from Beagle and that nothing would be gained anyway from visiting the "crash" site. I still see /.ers think Beagle was a US venture or don't realize that MER is an international effort (Although NASA paid for most of it.)
./ posters were informed... but I guess I am new here.
I thought
Beyond Beagle
Meanwhile, UK science minister, Lord Sainsbury, who was at a Beagle news conference in North London on Monday, gave the strongest indication yet that the British Government would help fund the European Space Agency's (Esa) Aurora programme.
"We need to be working with Esa to ensure that, in some form, there is a Beagle 3 that takes forward this technology. I very much hope that the Aurora programme which is currently being developed by Esa will take forward this kind of exploration."
The Aurora programme is Esa's bold vision to land probes, and perhaps eventually, astronauts on the Red Planet.
From here.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
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.
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.
Either my contact lens prescription is woefully out of date, or my brain has veered into wishful-thinking territory.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
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.
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!
...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
Beagle2 was only 'the lander' of Mars Express.
On the website we can read:
The Mars Express Orbiter will:
image the entire surface at high resolution (10 m/pixel) and selected areas at super resolution (2 m/pixel)
produce a map of the mineral composition of the surface at 100 m resolution
map the composition of the atmosphere and determine its global circulation
determine the structure of the sub-surface to a depth of a few kilometres
determine the effect of the atmosphere on the surface
determine the interaction of the atmosphere with the solar wind
All of that sounds really cool.
Iraq: war to save the U
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.
Russia did want to do a moon landing, but the US wouldn't let them use the sound stage.
As an American who is hugely against what I precieve is enourmous anti-American sentiment in Europe today (which I feel is 95% scapegoat, 5% legitimate criticism), Jugalator, I am embarrassed by any fellow Americans who made such comments. Did Europeans make immature "Metric" jokes with Mars Climate Orbiter crashed? You bet - for 5 straight years. But it shows class when you don't stoop to youre antagonizer's level as well.
Jugulator, although to be fair, you did take a crack at NASA with a Metric joke here. Hmmm... then again I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you were simply (correctly) pointing out that it was an embarrasing mistake, and not some blane us-bashing like we're too stupid or something.
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.
Whenever I read obvious BS like this on /. I bookmark the post, wait until I get new mod points and mod it down once I do.
We had your kind of patriotism in Germany too once you know? It's called fascism now.
Well if you are truly German perhaps reports of superior German education are unfounded after all. Allow me to give you a demonstration in political science 101.
What you are referring to in actually Nationalism. A firm belief that your country is the best. Nationalism gets a bad rap in part because of situations like Nazi Germany. But it is really not evil in itself to think your country is the best in the world. The trick is to work to make it so. If you do not have pride in your country, and do not work to make your country better, your civilization will ultimately fall.
Besides, what is wrong with having pride in one's country? Someone said that the US had nothing to be proud of. I refuted them and gave some of the myriad reasons US citizens have to be proud. What is wrong with that?
What would you say if I claimed Germany had nothing to be proud of? Would you not defend your country and speak of its rich cultural traditions, beautiful landscape (and women), beer and sausages, excellent automobiles, and kick-ass highway system? Is being proud of national achievements really fascist? Of course it isn't.
Fascism is the belief that society should be strictly controlled by a strong leader. Examples of Fascism in action are Fascist Italy and Spain and Nazi Germany during and before WWII. I have never advocated fascism and I never will. I believe strongly in freedom, democracy, and self-reliance. These are, by the way the cornerstones of American (US) philosophy of which we are likewise very proud.
The difference and analytical engines wew design by a Brit in the UK. The Z3 was German and the bombes and in particular, Colossus for code cracking were British, albeit the bombes had some Polish input. The first commercial electronic computer was built by a British company as was the first virtual memory computer. Essentially it wasn't until the superior buying power of major corporations and the US government spurred development over in the US. The European market was very fragmented then and without a large single domestic market, they fell behind.