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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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>>Why? Is he going to run up and get it once he locates it?
Of course not, that would be stupid to say.
The whole point of looking at failure is to work out *why* it happend, and *how* you can prevent it. The probe was lost as it entered the atmosphere, and never managed to send out its signal to earth. Looking at images of how it failed will give clues to any future missions.
You also must remember that a high percentage of probes sent to Mars fail. There's obviously a need to work out how these things fail and work out ways to prevent it from happning again.
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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.
Not much. Alfred Russel Wallace independently developed the theory of evolution, such that Darwin had to rush his publication to establish precdedence. We'd have the Wallace awards, and little silver wallace fish with feet on cars, but otherwise much the same. His later conversion to Spiritualism would have given some ammo to anti-evolution arguments I suppose. ... in all seriousness he probably lacked the fame and reknown Darwin had prior to publication, and his theory would not have been taken as seriously coming form him as it did from Darwin.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
That's actually a surprisingly large amount of information. Assuming this image is actually the probe, it allows us to rule out all the various catastrophic failure modes, which in turn tells us that the landing system actually worked. Had the probe failed to make it through reentry, or had the parachute or airbags not deployed, then we wouldn't be seeing this --- the probe would be scattered in lots of little pieces across the Martian surface.
In turn this allows us to validate this entire means of landing. Actually reaching the ground in one piece is possibly the hardest aspect of any extraterrestrial robotic mission, and if a low-budget approach like Beagle's actually works, then that's great news. In this case, we can tell that even though a few things went wrong and we lost the vehicle, this entire approach to getting down does, basically, work.
Honestly, if you had a project fail so spectacularly, and with so many people watching, wouldn't you want to do something (or anything) in your power to get back some of your credibility? Sure, they may be able to pinpoint some generic area of failure, such as 'hit too hard' or 'just doesn't work', but it's possible that he may just want to know what happened to his creation and gain a little bit of his own confidence and social status back.
If I sent a craft a few million miles, never heard from it again, and had the ability to possibly find it, I would probably do so.
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I'm makin' waffles! They got peanuts and soap in 'em!
Beagle was designed to bounce along the surface, losing energy in a controlled manner and coming to a safe stop. Dropping that into a crater is akin to putting the frog in the blender and dialing in a healthy shake. The bits might end up in roughly the same spot, but not necessarily in the same order.
I feel sorry for the Prof. He fought the system to do something that should have had far greater funding, and then they blamed him for what was partly bad luck and partly their fault. If you do a little research into the techology and the experiments planned its really quite amazing stuff. He deserved much more than he got.
It looks more like the face on Mars.
Isn't it fantastic what you can do with a few pixels and some imagination?
-- Cheers!
If the crash site could be found, it would be reasonable to plan a future mission to explore it. We would have the same opportunities to learn about Mars as the Beagle2 did, but we would also have an opportunity to learn some useful things about our own technology. We might not learn why the crash happened (yet then again we might), but we would certainly learn something important about how our materials weather in the martian environment.
Since there is so much potential value in doing a post mortem, it makes a lot of sense to me to devote some time now to locating the crash site, using the best equipment we've got in the area.
For similar reasons, I think our next visit to the Moon should include a detailed inspection of one of the lunar rovers that the USA has left up there. How better to learn how to build equipment for that environment than to study the degradation of equipment that was abandoned there 35 years ago?
Pro'ly should take another photo of that boot print, too. Hey, somebody is taking notes here, right? And somebody will arrange to translate these ideas into Chinese?