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."

Comments

Re:Uhhh

[NeoThermic]

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.

NeoThermic

Beagle 2 was part of the Mars Express mission

[YA_Python_dev]

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:

• discovered aurorae on Mars;

• transmitted back gigabytes of beautiful images with a resolution of up to 2 meters/pixel;

• discovered a huge subsurface water ice lake, with a thickness of 1.8 km and an extension of hundreds of kms;

• collaborated with NASA, receiving data from the Mars rovers and transmitting it back to Earth (yes: they use the same communication protocol!).

Why not??

[Savage-Rabbit]

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.

Re:Mars Rover to the rescue?

[uberdave]

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.