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Beagle 2 Official Inquiry Released
smasch writes "The ESA/UK Commission of Inquiry into Beagle 2 has released their
report (PDF) on why the Mars lander Beagle 2 failed. While the report does not name a single cause for the failure, it does name several problems including the lack of funding, lack of margin in the design, and treating Beagle 2 as a scientific instrument rather than as a spacecraft. The report also made nineteen recommendations to prevent these sorts of failures on future missions. We have previously mentioned the Beagle 2 failure, although the official report was not released to the public at that time.
The original story from MarsToday.com is available here."
Teaches them for using crappy gear
And no, I couldn't give a shit what my karma is.
A good q & a on the inquiry
Professor Pillinger rejected the inquiry's findings as "wisdom after the event". He said: "The gains we could have made from Beagle far outweighed the risks."
*ducks*
Proud Rememberer of the BBS Days.
1) Do not do calculations requiring a high degree of accuracy on a Pentium.
Beep beep.
Looks like a Palantír to me...
But could the failure of the Beagle 2 have been due to it's cratering in the Martian dirt?
For playing with my shiny new green laser pointer and shooting down beagle 2 by mistaking it for an aircraft.
Excellent- all eager /.ers click to view the report. At first, everything goes according to plan. After a while, the whole report disappears from view, with the host citing communication difficulies. A few days later, the report is written off as lost...
Add to that the attempt to design the Beagle 2 as a "bolt-on" experiment instead of a separate spacecraft (which it would be during separation, re-entry and landing) meant that the Beagle 2 was doomed. The myriad possible failure modes highlight how bad this decision was.
Of course, because no one thought to have telemetry from the Beagle 2 once it separated - only after it landed safely - the only way anyone will ever figure out what really went wrong will be to recover the pieces and do a physical analysis. If those future explorers discover there were multiple failure modes, I wouldn't be surprised.
No government will send explorers to find out. Instead, some Richard Branson-like people (i.e. rich nerds) will get together on their vacation to Mars and mount an expedition to the wreckage site and announce the results to the press.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
As a former spacecraft engineer, and now scientific instrument builder, there is some truth in this. It's all about the environment surrounding the few with enough intellect to bear in mind _at all times_ that anything done in space is intrinsically dangerous, difficult, and an extreme risk. Every atom must need be accounted for, for every second of every mission. Anything less is failure. And to quote an old friend, failure is not an option. Think Shackleton when you think of space. Only worse: think of Scott.
They should send three nearly identical copies of the same lander (re-using the same design and development effort), and have them land close enough to communicate directly with each other by radio.
This way, if one lander loses the ability to communicate with the orbiters or with Earth, or even two of them lose it, the third can relay their data. If something goes wrong on a lander, debugging should become far easier if you can still communicate with the broken system.
The scientific instruments could be distributed among them, each carrying roughly a third of the load. This would greatly reduce the size and weight of each lander, and this in turn would simplify the parachute system, the landing system, and many other parts.
Alternatively each lander could have the same weight, with a more varied range of instruments. The Beagle2 systeem is already impressively small and versatile.
Some instruments might be repeated on two landers or on all three, especially some very small and lightweight instruments.
If the landers are small and light enough, all three can travel on the same ship from Earth to Mars. In fact, I think on a single ship you could send several groups with three landers each.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I thought it was the vast amount more money and the vast amount more experience.
But no, apparently it's some 'cushy' scientist funded by the government. Unlike NASA, a vast operation funded by the government. Our lot had to spend half their time looking for funding!
Anyway, what did we learn from any of this?
Mars: deserted wasteland.
Titan: deserted wasteland.
Moon: deserted wasteland.
Venus: deserted wasteland.
What, beyond simple curiousity, is the benefit of any of it?
WTF? Cusy jobs for scientists and engineers working for the government in the UK? Scientists held in respect by their society? Fuck me! I've been working my guts out in private industry when I could go and work for that nice Mr. Bliar and be well paid and loved. Hint for non-UK residents: London Tube underground train drivers earn more that most engineers and scientists do in the UK. The hardest thing those blokes have to do is to remember to press the dead-mans pedal every few seconds!
British, stupid, and proud of it
cushily funded by the government
It was under-funded. That was one of the main reasons it fucked up.
Looking at some technical details (click "Technology"), I get the impression that Beagle2 might be able to crawl over the surface.
The instrument arm is strong enough to lift the instrument package. This strength might be enough to let it push down firmly on the ground, maybe 10 cm away, and then pull itself forward.
Maybe it couldn't pull along all the solar cell parts, maybe it would have to leave them behind, connected through an electric cable.
There's nothing in the description of Beagle2 that suggests that they have thought of this possibility.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
"Rule #1: Don't Have the British build the electronic parts"
um, the real reason the beagle 2 failed is very simple: they told it to land in a crater. see my comment on the previous mention of this subject on slashdot for four urls to articles supporting this.
The article can be read here
Though the 'redundancy'-suggestion is quite good, the price is too high. Another suggestion might be some satellites in geostationary orbit, dedicated in (1)observing the life and times of Mars-rovers and (2) continually streaming everything back to Earth. Minimum of 4, 8 would be nice. Add some AI or expert-system to manage them and the whole project would not depend so much on the connection between Earth and Mars. They could hang around for quite a few years and after the write-off of the rovers they (the satellites) could continue with observation of the climate etc. Expensive as well but hey, I'd rather have an expensive system in safe orbit than on the less safe surface.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
No, we can not all agree on this. Dont presume that you can speak for everyone, especially on topics where you (probably) are not qualified to make such statements.
While I respect your right to have your opinion, I think maybe you are talking out of your ass when you try to pretend that you know why NASA succedded and the Brits failed.
In 2000, Reuters said this:
If you want to criticize a failure, that is fine (although I dont think you are qualified to), analysis of errors can help to ensure they dont happen again. But your blind 'america is best - britain sucks' criticism is neither helpful nor true.
Does your Darwin snipe to mean that you do not believe in the theory of evolution by natural selection? I wouldnt be surprised if you don't.
There is something about the working conditions on the tube though, and in the short term tube drivies are worth more to the economy than scientists, as my tutor (a theoretical astrophysicist) used to say "I'm of less worth to society than a poet", not to mention tube train drives have to deal with people trying to kill themselves by jumping infornt of the trains trains.
Thats about the typical reason for any failed project.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Are you unaware of how many Mars missions fail? I seem to recall that about 1 in 4 Mars missions (of around 30) have failed. The Climate Orbiter, the Mars Observer, Mariner 8 and Mariner 3 are all classic examples of US failures. I think this alone shows how difficult it is to succeed with this type of mission.
Using the Beagle failure (the reasons for which are still unknown) to bash European and British people, politics and science seems a bit xenophobic to me. The recent success of the Huygens lander shows that ESA is capable of building a good lander and the fact that it hitched a lift with a US mission shows the general all round advantage of combining efforts.
In all this talk relating to the Beagle it seems to have been forgotten that the Mars Express has been a great success and has sent loads of useful new information back. Whilst the Beagle half of the mission is quite dissapointing the Express half has been great.
I would also question the utility of the US landers. Great mission guys but why spend all that money sending 2 cameras on wheels to Mars? Nice snapshots but why not try sending something useful next time like a spectrometer or some other sampling tool?
Maybe that's becuase often that's the cause of a faileur? For example, I know that if I fail to arrive somehwere on time, typically it's becuase I didn't leave soon enough.
Go eat some blood pudding you pastey faced limey bastard,
The Mad Yank
"I would also question the utility of the US landers."
p lo rationrovers.html
r sgloba lsurveyor.htmlc urrent/2001marso dyssey.html
Yes. They haven't done anything useful. We should use the Beagle as a perfect example of what to do...
"why not try sending something useful next time like a spectrometer or some other sampling tool?"
Maybe if you get off your mental duff and just look:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/current/marsex
http://athena.cornell.edu/
You might find that it does these things. Don't try to tear down the widely successful ROVER missions to mars by being ignornant of facts.
Also, to help you, there are several missions to Mars from NASA that are doing so much research right now:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/index.cfm
is a list....
Here's just a few Mars specific probes going on right now:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/current/ma
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/
And while NASA isn't doing as great a job as it could, it is doing *something*.
Now go back to your crawl space before I get medieval on your *ss.
The tube drivers have my respect of course.
But what about the scientists developing the Airbus 380?
Well, I wouldn't leave administration out either.
The report cites repeated reviews finding highlighting those funding and design issues, yet no action was ever taken on most of it.
Add to that a schedule with effectively zero margin for error, no central organization to manage the disparate groups (or sort out the fights when Martin Baker and Astrium couldn't work things out), and inadequate documentation, and you have a guaranteed disaster.
You can't build a complicated system without command, control and communication. Bad design is the effect, not the cause.
Lack of guaranteed funding during the early phases of development
Lack of an adequate managamenent organisation with the relevant experience
Lack of available margins to manage and mitigate risks Let's hope, that Airbus & Co. doesn't suffer from similar problems.
I have a real issue with people claiming the lack of funding was a root cause of failure.
Projects fail for inadequate project management, improper planning, a flaw in the design or execution. Spending more money and having more resources makes identifying and correcting these things _easier_ but is not a failure condition for the project.
Look at the amazing strides people have made with no 'funding' save their own ingenuity and drive. Certainly the British Space Program could have, with the very same financial resources allocated differently, either identified during the design phase that they did not have enough resources to move forward or else designed a successful misssion.
It's all about the Product Development Life Cycle (Define->Design->Develop->Deploy) and the interrelation of Time-Scope-Resources that allows a project to define two of the three, but the third one is defined by the other two. (If I need scope S completed in time T then I cannot also define budget B)
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Beagle 2 was done by the UK educational establishment.
The ESA - European Space Agency - are supposed to be like NASA, in charge of all EU space activity.
The ESA, who were sidelined by Beagle 2, have been asked to produce the report into why Beagle 2 failed.
To my total lack of astonishment, the report argues that all EU space activity must take place under the auspicies of the ESA, and it was wrong to do otherwise.
It's as if Spaceship One failed, and NASA - who's very existance is essentially threatened by private space travel - was asked to produce the report on the failure.
This report is questionable purely due to the conflict of interest on the part of the ESA.
--
Toby
While the report does not name a single cause for the failure, it does name several problems including the lack of funding, lack of margin in the design, and treating Beagle 2 as a scientific instrument rather than as a spacecraft
Did anyone else read this as the "it's not our fault!! They didn't give us enough money and were mean to us!" defense?
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
while you are certainly making a valid point, there was a certain arrogance toward the beagle mars mission that to some seemed it would spell disaster before it even left the ground.
make no mistake about it: the beagle 2 was a TOTAL loss. not only was the design uterly unprepared, but proper diagnostics were not relayed back during descent which effectively means that not only did the probe crash, but now we will never know WHY exactly it crashed, which means that learning from that mistake is now impossible.
and i am tired of hearing the "well, it actually landed but we just cant hear it" crap. this thing crashed, lets accept it and move on.
also, their design was completely unproven at that time (the nasa rovers have since shown that the overall design CAN work if done properly). given the shoe-string budge that they had, one would think that they would over-engineered their systems and copied the basic scheme of the Viking missions just to play it safe.
i, for one, was looking forward to seeing the results of the beagle 2 since it carried what many would consider to be more revealing scientific instrumentation, as the parent has pointed out.
1) The team conducting this study strongly recommends that the members of this team receive substantially more funding in the future.
caused by bad management and (strangely enough) lack of established funding, worsened the situation.
These inquiries could save a lot of money by creating boiler-plate inquiries that end up finding the same result anyhow:
Dear Inquiry Team Members,
After _____ months of study, we have concluded that the loss of ________________ was the result of poor management and lack of sufficient funding.
Sincerely,
Dr. ________________, Chief Investigator
Table-ized A.I.
It's worse than that. Over half of Mars missions have failed (20 of 36). And that's counting the Beagle mission as a success.
I am trolling
European socialism. Power to the people, but at what cost? Both of these projects have been the victim of inadequate funding because of socialist government policies.
Hold on, Tex. How is "less funding" a socialistic thing? I thought most socialistic governments tend to OVERspend tax money, not the other way around.
It appears to me that they essentially made the same mistake that NASA did in the late 90's: try the cheap route.
Actually, the cheap route may not be so bad because some of the cheaper probes *do* work (such as Sojourner). It may be more about prestige and reputation than cost/benefit analysis. If probes that cost 1/4 as much can have 1/3 or more of the reliability of the "full cost" probes, then the net science may be more.
However, it is harder to plan staff levels if there is more uncertainty. This must be factored in. But then again, more frequent but smaller missions may alleviate that problem to some extent.
Space exploration is about risks. You don't learn if you don't try. You don't know if a funding approach is sufficient until you try it. It is to Boldly Go Where No Funding Has Gone Before.
Perhaps if NASA kept on the cheaper route and perfected cheap probes, then in the longer term it would have paid off (and arguably already was).
However, if you go the high-risk route, you generally should put more feedback mechanisms on the probes so that one can learn from mistakes for the next round. This is probably the biggest flaw of Beagle's approach. Trial and error requires that you know what the error was.
As far as the Huygens communications slip-up, that can happen to anybody. NASA has made dumb mistakes also. Huygens had a back-up channel that paid off.
Table-ized A.I.
Although I agree that the Britain-bashing is silly, one could perhaps argue that the British should have heeded the lessons already learned by NASA's "cheaper, better, faster" debacle a few years before Beagle. They appearently thought that they were immune from similar problems out of national pride. Cases of national arrogance can be found on both sides here, it seems. Human tribal nature, I guess.
Table-ized A.I.
I seem to recall that about 1 in 4 Mars missions (of around 30) have failed. The Climate Orbiter, the Mars Observer...
I think it was one orbiter and one lander (Polar Lander) IIRC.
I would also question the utility of the US landers. Great mission guys but why spend all that money sending 2 cameras on wheels to Mars? Nice snapshots but why not try sending something useful next time like a spectrometer or some other sampling tool?
Do you mean Sojourner or the twin rovers? Sojourner *did* have an X-ray spectrometer IIRC, and the twin probes have 3: X-ray, the water-oriented one (i forgot name), and the 12 or so camera filters that reach into UV and IR (remote spectrometry).
Beagle indeed did have some interesting experiments not covered by the rovers, but you can only do so much per mission. Future missions are planned to look at different aspects of Mars. The rover missions were purposely geared toward analyzing ancient water signs.
Table-ized A.I.
Support the project with this attractive commemerative wallpaper!h eroes-of-mars/
http://www.alittlepoison.com/archives/2004/01/22/
No testing of the EDLS due to a fixed price variable scope contract with Astrium seem to have left us in the situation where we are not sure if the landing system would ever have worked. For a few million quid we could perform belated testing of the design which may help future missions and exonerate the EDLS design team from blame.
How many missions must end up succeeding in-spite of just as many shortcomings? Knew the ESA would use this as an excuse to grab future dev work from the Brits.
Lessons left out:
Leave the exploration of space to those qualified and experienced - the United States of America.
Quit trying to compete with the USA technology wise, because you will lose.
With the wealth of scientific data that the MER project has returned over the last year, could the Beagle 2 have given us any more? I understand the need to find out what went wrong for engineering reasons, but scientifically, were we really set back that much?
They probably were on the bad side of the odds. Mars is tough on probes. Even the US had two failures in its last five Mars mission.
I hope they try again. ESA Huygens was sucessful. And there are some lunar probes on the way.
I propose a cultural problem.
I would like a Brit to reflect here on why nearly all of their major high profile public projects are doomed to spectacular failure.
I get the feeling that the once great empire building country seems to have exported and lost it's go-getters and is stuck with second rate middle management who are hell bent on staying where they are, interfering with their own agendas and covering their butts later.
Curiously, there was something similar idea the Europeans had called NETLANDER, which would have landed a network of 4 geophysical stations on the surface of mars. Unfortunately, the project was cancelled in 2003.
d er/
Links:
http://smsc.cnes.fr/NETLANDER/
http://ganymede.ipgp.jussieu.fr/GB/projets/netlan
I admit, our space agency is milking the awesome photos returned by the rovers for all the publicity they're worth, but Spirit and Opportunity are clearly more than just another lousy Yank tourist taking pictures of the Tower Bridge only to label it as London Bridge in their photo album.
We Brits are very good at our sums. If we can fund an unsuccessful mission for £30 million - when a successful one costs ten times that amount - then we have saved £270 million.
We're smarter still: it gives us the precedent of an unsuccessful mission to point to. Then we can reject future missions on the grounds that all this space nonsense is too risky and likely to fail. See? Now we don't have to spend anything at all!
I have worked at NASA and in Silicon Valley and agree with your comments... but you are wrong about the science suite on the rovers (i.e, that they are cameras on whees). They have a number of instruments for spectral analysis, as well as a rock grinder and microscopic imager (Ok, that's a camera, too)...
We did think of post-ejection telemetry, but there was insufficient mass budget to add electronics to the back face in order to transmit it, and it used too much power for the small battery, also mass constrained, and Mars-Express wasn't overhead during the descent and entry phase (it was parking). The simple "ping" system on the JPL MERs worked well. We should copy that next time.