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."

Comments

Lessons learned report

[Realistic_Dragon]

1) Do not do calculations requiring a high degree of accuracy on a Pentium.

Re:Lessons learned report

[quarkscat]

(2) Avoid mixing Imperial and SI units in
your calculations (thanks NASA & Lockheed)

Standard Boilerplate Recommendation #1

[Citizen of Earth]

1) The team conducting this study strongly recommends that the members of this team receive substantially more funding in the future.