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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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i think i see waldo in that high quality image...
always mosh clockwise
I can see that news in a Charles Shultz comic strip
In other news, this evening, the Sun will set over the Western Horizon.
Anyone know how it was to go about this? I assume that it may analyse soil samples, but what else from there?
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I've seen less pixelated images of tits on network tv.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
>>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.
NeoThermic
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If it were closer to Cydonia, maybe we could pick up movement as the little guys take the spacecraft away and hide it in top secret Martian military bunkers.
I hope they don't have an equivalent Will Smith fighter pilot capable of flying our space ships over there. It'll make our invasion that much harder.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Because they are thinking of building another one. Nice to find out what went wrong with the last one, avoid the same mistakes, eh?
images with a much better resolution showing a big face in the martian soil...
Just wishfull thinking i guess.
Ooo! If it is a Beagle Active Probe, we will be able to see 4 hexes, regardless of terrain! It is the ultimate close quarters detection tool, really.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
let's face it. This is something that you would do, if a bit of alien technology came crashing down out of the skies.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Wow, we can't find Bin Laden on Earth, but we can find Beagle 2 on Mars.
This is a funny world we live in...
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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:
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
I wonder how much different life would be today if the HMS Beagle had shipwrecked in the Galapagos and <i>Origin of the Species</i> had never been published.
~Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
... it has probably been busy humping some poor martian's leg all this time.
Allow me be the first to say:
"Curse you, Red Baron!"
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Of course. Images are (excuse the pun) only part of the full picture. Combined with sensor readings (that they should have up to a point), and other various information factors, they should be able to work out what happend with a decent degree of accuracy.
The images will generally show how it crashed, from which you can work out how it came to crash like that, which is generally the information you want.
NeoThermic
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Thanks, I'm here all week.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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.
to seek out life on mars. Perhaps this was some sort of martian conspiracy!
""There is a lot of disturbance in this crater, particularly a big patch on the north crater wall which we think is the primary impact site," Professor Pillinger explains.""
It must've been quite a windy day in Arizona...
But, like the other poster said: "Wow, we can't find Bin Laden on Earth, but we can find Beagle 2 on Mars."
Seems like we've got our priorities misplaced...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Prof. Pillinger is, understandably, clutching at straws. The science (and academic PR) aspects of Beagle were first class. The engineering (i.e. the expensive bit), was totally underfunded and was eventually overwhelmed. If he can prove that the concept was fine and dandy, but something small went wrong, then he can (with much greater authority) go and ask for money for a new one. However, it's unlikely after ESA's board of inquiry, that Prof. Pillinger will ever be involved at such a senior level again. http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMLKAHHZTD_index_0.html
With all the super expensive junk we keep dumping on Mars, it'll take better resolution/techniques to determine what's junk and what's a natural feature worth taking a look at.
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.
---
I'm makin' waffles! They got peanuts and soap in 'em!
Why, that's too costly, even for NASA. They'll contract their Marshi-pino counterparts to pack up the pieces and ship them back to Earth.
Or, worse, the US & UK will advocate ignoring the Earth-based policies toward abandoned vesses and craft. Then, they'll tell the Martians (a la Columbus), "WE discovered YOU!"... There'll be mumbo jumbo about minutae in contracts and then it'll end with the Earthers saying, "Look, a DEAYUL's A DEAYUL!"..
Then, the Martians will promptly (and, rightly) zap our asses back to kingdom come...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
What do those two things have in common?
Horrible photos (usually blurry)
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The robotic laboratory was designed to search Mars for signs of past or present life.
...
Scientists are mortified to report that the Beagle 2 did indeed find life on Mars. Unfortunately, due to its poorly controlled re-entry it crashed into and killed all the Martian lifeforms
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Given that the Mars Polar lander crash site has been misidentified using better imagery, the chances that this is Beagle II are low. The image shown in the article is not compelling. There is the stench of politics surrounding the result. Very nearly worked? Uh Huh.
an ill wind that blows no good
I think this has proved NOT to be the remains of ESA's spacecraft... nice try though
FTA: "Professor Pillinger claims the images show Beagle 2 came very close to being the first spacecraft to mount a concerted search for life on the Martian surface."
The problem is, the Martian that saw it coming down mistakenly thought it was an interplanetary baseball, and gave it a good crack with his bat about 4 feet from the ground. Then it broke apart, he said "Mzck froltk!"(1) and ran off.
(1) "Mzck froltk" translates from Martian native dialect into, roughly, "Oh shit"
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Now if only they could find Willzyx.
BeOS?
Because the US has had plenty of failures as well as successes landing probes on mars, and Beagle 2 was completed long before Spirit and Opportunity were landed on Mars, so there was no way to know they were going to be a success.
Oh no... it's the future.
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.
Beagle Smash of Death? :-/
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
OK, let's just assume for the sake of argument that this is the Beagle...
Is this site anywhere near one of the Mars Rovers? Could they possibly drive there and examine it?
How cool would that be!?!?!
Actually, it ain't that hard if you keep practicing
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
"Before Beagle landed, a colleague reported that in a lecture the previous summer, Prof. Pillinger said that the parachute's size wasn't critical as it 'collects air' which helps slow the lander down..."
But in a sense that's true: provided it's big enough to slow the lander to the correct terminal velocity before the landing, the size doesn't matter... make it ten times bigger and you'll just be floating down for longer under the parachute.
On the other hand, if it's 10% too small, you're probably screwed.
A: All over the Martian countryside!
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
It looks more like the face on Mars.
The French built-in a white flag for good measure to surrender to any Martians they may encounter.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Better High-Res images find a sign attached which reads "Up Yours Earthlings".
in other news... Mars declares war after earth space probe kills their leader who was out for an afternoon stroll in the desert... diplomats not hopeful that a peaceful settlement can be reached!
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Well, at least it landed on Mars. Remember when NASA lost a probe because they mixed up imperial and metric units?
Looks like another entry on the Mars Scorecard.
r ecard.html
Mars is winning, folks.
http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/marssco
Why? Is he going to run up and get it once he locates it?
Because when an experiment has undesired results it's often best to find out what seems to have gone wrong before you try the same experiment again... Nothing like throwing millions of Euros away on another probe in the hopes that it was "just some glitch that might not happen again".
Clearly he has spent too much time collaborating with the fine folks at NASA that kind of professional time-wasting may only be learned from an american.
Clearly you spend too much time bashing Americans to take the time to think why understanding how one experiment fails may help another be a success.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Now I know why the search tool is named Beagle! I wonder what Kat stand for?
Some settling may occur during posting.
This was not designed as a cooperative test of differing landing systems. The Beagle 2 project was seriously underfunded and just too short on time to properly test all of their systems.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
- James Lopez [apparently]
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
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Accidentally skip "2 Probe" in the heading and we got news.
Isn't it fantastic what you can do with a few pixels and some imagination?
-- Cheers!
The cost of the Beagle 2 mission is believed to be somewhere around 70-80 million dollars. Once it went over budget they stopped talking about how much it actually cost. It failed. This is not counting its free launch and ride to Mars.
The cost of the NASA twin rovers mission was something like 600 million dollars, or 300 million each. That includes the costs of building the rocketship to get them to Mars. The rovers are still doing science on Mars.
I think NASA got the better deal.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Looking at the picture reminds me of ink blots...
The Beagle looked like a suitcase anyway, they should have had the outer casing built by samsonite. The we would get back nice pictures of Martians jumping up and down on it to now avail.
Yes I agree, let's re-assign those scientists studying Mars. Tell them to suck it up, go find Bin Laden and do something useful for a change.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Was it spotted before, or just mottled like other beagles?
sigs, as if you care.
It probably went to hell and back, and now it's alive.
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?
You choose this, one of the darkest days of the year, to make fun of those of us living in the northern latitudes?
(If you live far enough North, the sun will set over the Southern Horizon today - that is if you see it at all)
Mmmm.. Donuts
Intelligent Design?
Only if it weighs the same as a Martian duck.
--------
This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
JPL is "open source" putting all Rover raw images and other data on the web within 72 hours of receiving. The ESA so slowly trickles out its results that I dont even bother looking at them.
Wallace came up with the same idea as Darwin a few years later and submitted it for reading before the Royal Society before Darwin wrote up his ideas. So the theory of evolution by natural selection was an idea "waiting to happen" and would eventually be published by somebody.
Darwin's friends intercepted the paper, and told Darwin who nearly had a nervous breakdown. Wallace graciously allowed both papers to be presented before the Society simultaneously. Darwin fleshed his out with reams of observations and experiments and several controversial books.
Could it be possible that he is "seeing" too much in that photo, like Schiaparelli or Percival Lowell? I have seen some amazing analyses of photographic intelligence before, but interpreting so much from so few pixels is astounding. Obviously there is no wishful thinking happening here in this "extrapolation."
Because the guy in charge of the project, Professor Pillinger, was too busy bragging about how his probe was so superior to NASA designs.
Actually, this shouldn't be labeled as flamebait.
Prof Pillinger has been bagging on NASA and the NASA probes for some time (esp about cost).
This announcement may in fact be about really finding Beagle 2. It might also be a desperate attempt to regain some sort of credibility. Pillinger was damned pretty thoroughly by that ESA report on the Beagle 2 mission.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Since this was a metric-only project, I thought this sort if thing wasn't supposed to happen! I mean there were no UK/US used anywhere in it so, there could be no mis-calculations like in the mars orbiter.
(for the slow people: this is sarcasm)
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
1) Because we don't have a satellite orbiting the moon at a similar distance.
2) If the pictures are as pixelated as the ones this story is built on, it isn't going to change a skeptic's mind.
My comment about the funding/time difficulties of the project is also factual, its not really disputed that this is one of the root causes of the failure of the mission. They simply didn't have the time or money to test critical components of the mission.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Dose anyone know where I can find pictures of the Apolo landing site (somewhere in the sea of tranquility on the moon) taken from earth ?
that would be interesting.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
"Beagle 2 spotted on mars"
Sounds like more like a Dalmation to me.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
Of course it is - Beagle2 got pixellated on the way down. But who did it, and why?
-- All your bass are below two Hz
look at the right side of the image, looks like a face to me.....
You never catch me alive
"...images suggest the mission very nearly worked...
You can't tell a thing from those images. NASA might as well say "Challenger very nearly made it to orbit".
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Colin Pillinger comes up with these claims from time to time. It allows him to say, "Oh, it very nearly worked" instead of admitting it was astonishingly poorly run and underfunded. Just google his comments pre-launch and you'll see karma in action. He's as close to a crackpot to anyone you'll find.
This login name for sale.
Colin Pillinger says the images suggest the mission very nearly worked.. in much the same way cars very nearly miss when they crash into each other.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I was just wondering... How the hell many craft have we crashed into that poor planet?
It's no wonder the Martians want to kill us all.