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Beagle 2 Failure Theories
Dan East writes "New Scientist has an article discussing the failure of ESA's Beagle 2 Lander. Theories as to why the landing failed include thinner than expected upper atmosphere, extreme atmospheric temperature fluctuations, and possible physical damage to Beagle 2 seen in an image acquired immediately after it separated from Mars Express. Recent data acquired by Mars Express, as well as NASA's Mars Rovers, are helping direct investigations into the failure. So far only around half of Beagle 2's landing ellipse has been imaged in an attempt to locate remnants of the lander. USA Today is also running an AP story on these latest theories."
The most likely candidate as an explaination of failure is simply human error. There are rarely errors in electronics that are not caused by humans that could cause such a massive loss. Usually, errors in hardware do not exist, as the hardware is top of the line and checked and re-checked for defects. (Granted, however, that sometimes faulty hardware may slip through the cracks) It is most likely something simpler than "it landed in a crater full of quicksand and sank." However entertaining it may be to picture a multi-million dollar rover sinking into the martian soil, it simply is impossible. To create quicksand one needs water. Even though the Spirit and Opportunity rovers found evidence of water on Mars, it was a long time ago, not today, that Mars was wet. So that simply is not feasible. Space debris, while a popular theory, is so unlikely (the chances of a meteor hitting something in the middle of space are *chuckle* ASTRONOMICAL) So this leaves us with simple human error. Something as simple as a single line of code can destroy an entire project (programmers know what I'm talking about). If you will remember, a few years back NASA lost a multi-million dollar spacecraft because of an error converting from the English system to the Metric system, so it is usually something tiny like that. If you asked me, it's most likely that someone typed an extra "0" somewhere in the code for orbital data and/or surface descent for the capsule. Even though it is just one "0", over that long of a distance it would make a huge difference. Remember that each decimal place is a factor of 10! Telling a spacecraft to orbit at "100,000" miles above the surface is a whole lot different than telling the spacecraft to orbit at "1,000,000" miles above the surface. Such an error would just send the poor Beagle 2 hurtling into the vast reaches of space or crashing to the surface. So it is most likely something like this that has caused all the trouble with the Beagle 2 and given those poor Brits such a hard time.