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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
In other news, this evening, the Sun will set over the Western Horizon.
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
Well - if the probe falls into a Canal then we'll know that it found previous life ...
James P. Barrett
>>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
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
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.
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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It all depends if you are a pessimist or an optimist.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
Evil Overlord Rule # 50: My main computers will have their own special operating system that will be completely incompatible with standard IBM and Macintosh powerbooks.
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.
Anyone know how it was to go about this? I assume that it may analyse soil samples, but what else from there?
Drop business cards as it went: "If you are a living Martian, or you know where evidence of past Martians may be found, please call 1-800-BEAGLE2."
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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
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"
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.
And if it floats in that canal does that mean that probe is a witch?
Sorry I couldn't stop myself from typing this
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
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
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.
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.
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!?!?!
"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.
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 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?
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.
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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
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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.
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
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..
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.
Was it spotted before, or just mottled like other beagles?
sigs, as if you care.
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?
Not from Earth, but give Google Moon (Seriously) a try:
http://moon.google.com/
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
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.