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Beagle 2 Probe Spotted on Mars
evilduckie writes "According to this BBC article photos taken by the Mars Global Surveyor show the European Beagle 2 probe which was lost after it apparently crash-landed on Mars."
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The quote there is a bit short on words.
Basically the probe was designed to impact on the surface, after being slowed by the parachutes. The underside of the probe was capable and designed to impact hard. However, what appears to have happend is that the impact was side on, hitting where the probe wasn't designed to be hit, and doing fatial damage.
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The Beagle 2 lander was part of the very successful European Space Agency (ESA) Mars Express mission.
Mars Express contains 7 different scientific instruments and, amongs other things, it has already:
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However, what appears to have happend is that the impact was side on, hitting where the probe wasn't designed to be hit, and doing fatial damage.
Not fatal damage, just tranceiver damage. They currently believe that the Beagle was operational, but that its radio instruments were damaged, thus preventing it from calling home.
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"He thinks the craft may have hit the ground too hard"
In other news, this evening, the Sun will set over the Western Horizon.
Bear in mind that impact damage was just one of many possible failure modes for Beagle 2. Transmitter failure, failure of the antenna to deploy, failure of the solar panels to produce enough power, failure of the onboard computers, and so on - there are lots and lots of reasons why it failed to transmit back to Earth. Up until now there's been an assumption catastrophic impact damage occurred, but if the interpretation of this picture is accurate then Beagle 2 appears to have made it down in basically one piece and may have actually been working long enough to unfold and deploy - so the impact was not catastrophic, but may have been far enough out of the designed envelope to damage the transmitter or the antenna.
In general I fully agree with you but in this instance I think you're a little off the mark. There's no way the Beagle 2 team will be able to determine exactly what went wrong just by analyzing images. All an image -- however high the resolution -- is going to do is confirm that yes, it did crash or yes, it landed properly but failed to communicate. To determine the why and how of their failure would require a mission to investigate the crash site.
I'm not so sure about that. The fact that Beagle has been found at all has already told the designer that it didn't burn up on in the atmosphere and if it was found in more or less the the right place the designer can also conclude that most likely there was nothing wrong with the navigation. If they ever manage to get any close-up photos of Beagle of sufficiently high resolution they can perhaps also determine whether it was damaged on landing, perhaps, due to a failiure of the landing mechanism. If Beagle is structurally intact one would conclude that it is most likely something went wrong with the electronics. While none of this will pinpoint the exact faliure it will still help to rule out at least some causes of faliure and confirm which aspects of the design were sound and which probably weren't which will in turn help with the design of Beagle II if such a mission ever sees the light of day.
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I always loved the Haiku that were all the rage a few years back. /., but no more than In Russia and pWn3d. Some more I found on google.
They did get a little overdone on
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If i remember correctly it had a novel "mole" that could move along the surface and bury into the ground in an area a few meters away from probe.
Considering for how cheaply this project was done for (about $120M), the fact it may have landed and survived (for the most) is very supprising.
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It would, of course, be very cool. However, they aren't even close. For all their travelling, the Spirit and Opportunity have probably not even left the dot that marks their location.
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Not from Earth, but give Google Moon (Seriously) a try:
http://moon.google.com/
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