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.

What really happened to Beagle 2

[tlon]

And in related news today, Symantec Corporation announced that it has developed innoculation files for the W32.Beagle.3@mm virus. Symantec officials commented that there is no apparent link between Beagle.2 and the crash of the Beagle lander, but it is not taking any chances.

British engineering

[MadFarmAnimalz]

the same team claims to have learned lessons

Translation: They're going to paint it flourescent green so they can tell where it crashed.

Beagle #2,019,197,204,183,110 has the answer!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mars's composition is mainly... Beagle material.

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: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!

Design flaws waiting to happen....

[Jtheletter]

From the article:
Advances in solar cell technology mean the craft will be able to cope with half the number of solar panels its predecessor carried: it will open up to reveal two panels rather than previous four.

So now there is a 50% greater chance of catastrophic energy collection failure. Check.

The craft's UHF antenna (identical to that on Beagle 2) is positioned on the top panel, so the motorised fanfold mechanism ensures it always points upwards for communication.

So now when the "fanfold mechanism" for that panel fails we lose communications along with half the power. Check.

Engineers stressed, however, that this was a preliminary proposal and the design would continue to "evolve".

Let's hope so.

Stick with seafaring tradition

[Camel Pilot]

You never name a ship after a spectacular failure

Would you sail on the Titanic II

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".

Re:Plan for success

[BabyDave]

Step 5: Realise that you attached the antenna the wrong way around ... oh wait, that's NASA :)

Plan details involve...

[Anonymous Coward]

...sending a lander to intercept one of the mars rovers, breaking off the NASA antennas, installing a proper British antenna, and placing a Beagle 3 plaque on it.

Things we learned:

[sxltrex]

Don't hit the ground so hard.

Re:Beagle 3...why?

[Ga_101]

The two NASA rovers are robotic Geologists'.

The Beagles' are robotic Chemists.

While the NASA robots have done a good job in the "Hummm thats interesting" way of Geology, if Beagle 2 had landed, we would know if life had existed in that area of Mars. Indeed, the head of the Beagle project has critised the two NASA rovers for lacking anything to conduct any real science.

It is reasons like this that we need to send more robots. Beagle 2 cost a mere fraction of either of the two NASA rovers and they in turn cost a hell of a lot less than a manned mission.

Until money is not an object (ie like in the original space race, aka "beat the commies/capitalist pig dogs"), a manned mission won't happen. This is the next best thing.

Fantastic news!

[ScottMaxwell]

My only comment on Beagle 2 when the press asked me about it (as a member of the MER mission, we got that question a lot) was that I was sorry it hadn't worked out, but that the only real failure would be if the Beagle 2 team, and the British people generally, gave up and didn't do a Beagle 3. It was an inventive spacecraft design with an exciting mission, and the team behind it clearly was capable of great things.

So I'm as happy as anyone (except maybe Dr. Pillinger :-) to see that they're going for it. From a JPL-based Martian to my friends on the Beagle 3 team (and at ESA), best of luck with Beagle 3!