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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."
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."
1) Do not do calculations requiring a high degree of accuracy on a Pentium.
Beep beep.
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.
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.
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
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"
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.
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.
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
1) The team conducting this study strongly recommends that the members of this team receive substantially more funding in the future.
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.
Quit trying to compete with the USA technology wise, because you will lose.
Are you kidding? We're still sending people into space with less computing power on board than TI-83's. Well, we were. Today we don't send anyone into space because our so-called "advanced technology" is old n' busted. EU's got the new hotness, and we got the old n' busted. I would like to see China and the EU do more in space, so we feel more compelled to one-up them and do even greater things in space than we have yet done. As an added side benefit to all, international space races have been and will continue to be of benefit to all humanity.
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.