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

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

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!