Beagle 3 Plans Revealed

Richard W.M. Jones writes "While the UK's Beagle 2 may have been a well-publicised failure, the same team claims to have learned lessons and are now developing plans for Beagle 3. The new probe might be attached to a European mission due to launch in 2009 as part of Europe's Aurora project."

Comments

For those of you wondering what happened to

[Pingular]

beagle 1, here's your answer.

Re:Stick with seafaring tradition

[eln]

Technically, wasn't Apollo 11 the name of the mission, not the spacecraft? The spacecraft was named "Columbia" (command module) and "Eagle" (lander). That would be like saying the space shuttle that crashed was the "STS 107" rather than "Columbia".

Earth VS Mars

[Picass0]

Mars Expensive Hardware Lob - The Mars Scorecard - 20:17 with Earth losing

http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/marssc or ecard.html

Re:the british and electronics...

[Tandoori Haggis]

Thats quite funny.

Reality check:

Real ale is typically served at celar temperature, (below room tempererature), so it's refreshing. It is typically served a few degrees warmer than a block of ice because there's no need to numb your taste buds unlike certain "beers" which
if you could taste you wouldn't drink.

Re:Huh??

[meringuoid]

Mars Express, the mothership, was built by ESA. It's a success, it's cheap, and we're planning to build a Venus probe based around the same design - a bit like the way the US reused the Mariner spaceprobe design for many missions in the seventies.

Beagle 2 was a longshot from the word go. It was proposed as one of the scientific packages Express would carry to Mars; nobody was expecting anyone to propose a lander, ESA had in mind spectrometers and sensors and things. So it had to be the smallest lander possible. It also needed funding. Britain has fuck-all space programme, and the Open University, while renowned for its distance-learning courses, isn't exactly loaded, so the cash had to be scraped together from corporate sponsors, whip-rounds, Blur, and what little they could get out of the government on the promise of good publicity.

Personally I'm amazed it ever got off the ground. Had it landed successfully, it would have been even better; the next Mars probe might easily have carried dozens of the things for not much cost, and scattered them all over the planet. But it seems there's a limit to how small and cheap you can make a device to land on another planet.

Now... speaking of European piggyback landers, I wish Huygens the very best of luck!