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

Huh??

[SeaDour]

I thought one of the reasons cited for the failure of Beagle 2 was the very fact that it was piggybacked on a separate agency's orbiter. Now they're contradicting themselves, and saying they'll try it again?

Re:Stick with seafaring tradition

[DeathByDuke]

well, good point, but only the robot died with Beagle 2 ;)

Re:English to Metric?

[Col. Bloodnok]

Firstly it's known as imperial not 'English' and secondly we stopped using imperial units for engineering and science many, many years ago.

You'll still find me using feet and inches when I'm doing a spot of carpentry in the garden shed at the weekend and I'll follow that up with a crafty pint in the local, to wash the sawdust away.

Interestingly most timber sizes in the UK are just the imperial size expressed in millimetres, so if you ask for 90mmx90mm instead of 4-by-4 prepared, you receive blank stares, but thanks to the bloody EU, it's illegal to advertise it in imperial measurments.

Will there be more *guaranteed* funding?

[slinted]

MPs blame lack of cash for failure of Beagle 2

The most recent report on the failure of Beagle II, done by the House of Commons Science and Technology select committee sighted many "amateurish" funding woes and a lack of cooperation between the USA and the UK government as the underlying cause of failure. Pillenger responded by saying that they couldn't get guarantees of funding mostly because those groups didn't have the money to give. But what does that say about the success of the next project if the funding for Beagle II was dependant on groups that couldn't afford to guarantee funding but said they'd try to find the money anyway...and then failed to do so, unless they go at the next mission with a different attitude?

NASA has backed off of its Faster-Better-Cheaper which left faster and cheaper intact, while somewhat disregarding better, in favor of Faster-Better-Fund_Projects_Appropriatly...which seems certainly to have done the trick for such projects as the Mars Exploration Rovers, which (I would agrue appropriatly) cost hundreds of millions of dollars to properly build and test for the challenges they were being asked to face.

Re:Stick with seafaring tradition

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yes, I would, because you can bet that the Titanic II would be the most carefully engineered passenger ship in history.

I flew on 9/11/02. A lot of the people in the airport with me were chattering about how nervous they were. I was thinking that there has probably been no safer day in the entire history of aviation to fly.

Re:Stick with seafaring tradition

[Captain_Chaos]

You never name a ship after a spectacular failure

I agree, but the Beagle 3 isn't named after the Beagle II, it's named after the Beagle, which was a spectacular success...