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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."
I think you're confusing effect with cause, here...
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.
3 landers = 3 times the parachutes, external equipment, communications systems. With that kind of weigh allowance, we could do a lot more. Beagle 2 was static - with 3 times the weight allowance, we could have a rover.
Not everything will run perfectly - NASA dropped a fragile disc into the desert at 500m/s last year if you remember. But we can't afford to build double redundancy into already expensive spacecraft.
The main cost is design and development. Repeating hardware that has already been designed and developed is far, far cheaper.
Note that the Beagle2 rover was just a small part of the Mars Express spacecraft that went to Mars.
A rover would be great! But it's also more risky, and far more expensive. The Beagle2 system was impressively cheap. With redundancy we could get success at a far lower cost than with a rover.
I do feel that Europe should eventually send rovers, but perhaps not in its first mission landing on Mars. You need to gather experience in increments.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
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?
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.
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.
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.
um, the real reason the beagle 2 failed is very simple: they told it to land in a crater.
Unless you have pin-point landing technology, you cannot really avoid operating near the vacinity of craters on Mars, because they are almost everywhere. But compared to all the other possible risks, landing on the wall of a large crater is fairly remote, probably something like 1/200.
Viking 1 was selected to land in one of the most crater-free parts of Mars. Images revealed a giant boulder about 20 feet from the lander. If it had landed on that boulder, it would have been toast. A large pointy rock can pop airbags also.
Table-ized A.I.
or maybe... ...landing on mars is difficult, even for the best engineers, and landing on mars is still a big gamble no matter how you engineer your probes.