Posted on 12/26/2003 3:30:38 PM PST by johnny7
LONDON : British scientists kept hoping for the survival of the Beagle 2 Mars lander despite its silence since it arrived on the planet's surface early on Christmas Day.
"I'm not feeling too down yet," said Colin Pillinger, the scientist in charge of the lander project, part of the European Space Agency's first independent interplanetary mission. He said at least 13 attempts to get in touch with the lander had been programmed in coming days, including another try by the giant radio telescope at Jodrell Bank later Friday to pick up Beagle's call signal -- a nine-note tune composed by the British pop group Blur.
Despite being wrapped in protective balloons, the craft may have been knocked out by a hard landing. But scientists were optimistic that the problem was no more serious than an antenna misaligned or perhaps blocked by a stone. "You have to liken this to the early days of mobile phones," Pillinger said. "We've got one mobile phone, one mobile phone mast and one satellite, and we have to match these things up and it's not that easy."
Scientists said there was also a possiblity of getting information from the American Mars Odyssey space probe or perhaps eventually from the Beagle's mother craft, the Mars Express, which was successfully inserted into an equatorial orbit on Thursday. The Mars Express was scheduled to be shifted to a polar orbit on December 30 from which it will be able to cover the planet's entire surface with a variety of instruments to measure its climate and physical characteristics. Although those instruments were providing 90 percent of the mission's investigative resources, the loss of the Beagle 2, the most dramatic of the experiments, would be a serious disappointment to the British team that developed it.
The 33-kilogram (73-pound) lander is packed with instruments to analyse soil samples and attempt to answer the mystery of whether there is, or has been, life on Mars. The disc-shaped probe had been due to touch down at Isidis Planitia, a large, flat plain near the Martian equator that may once have been awash with water. Mars has been touted as a potential future home for Man, because it is not too far from the Sun and, some believe, may have abundant reserves of water below its surface. The seas that covered it billions of years ago have long boiled away into space or possibly receded below ground, but why this catastrophe happened is one of the many unresolved puzzles about the Red Planet. Mars is a notorious challenge for exploration, with powerful winds, a rock-strewn landscape and dust storms. Of the 11 landers that have previously been dispatched there since 1960, only three have ever succeeded in carrying out their mission. Mars Express will need until January 4, after completing a series of final orbital manoeuvres, before it can be in position to receive any signal from Beagle 2, if the probe has not been knocked out.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding the fate of Beagle 2, European Union officials were trumpeting the success of the overall mission. "The Mars Express project is a good illustration of what Europe can achieve, on this planet and beyond, if it works together," said the European Union's top research official, Philippe Busquin. "Even if not all parts of the mission have succeeded, we must still acknowledge its significance, and build upon the experience gained to ensure higher chances of succes in the future," he said in a statement from Brussels.
Two American mobile landers, Spirit and Opportunity, are due to arrive on Mars on January 4 and 24. - AFP
Boy... you can tell how they hated to let this get in the article. I bet the cause of Beagle 2's failure has a Made in France label on it.
Need I remind you of a certain pair of rather embarrassing all-American Mars mission failures in the past few years?
I don't know what it is about Mars, but the success rate for Mars missions is remarkably low (see this link for a summary). The most recent failure was the Japanese Mars-B mission, last month. (That mission has the ignominious distinction of having failed twice...)
Well, to be fair, most Mars missions that have attempted to land on the surface have been failures.
Why do we keep running the hundred meter dash in the Olympics?
Any suggestions? Landing has been done. Orbiting has been done. Mixing metric and English measure has been done. What else could they do?
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 Beagle 2
Beagle 2 on Mars: The ESA-Scientists imagined that the landing of their electronic snooper would have looked like this model drawing
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REUTERS
Beagle 2 should have landed on the red planet like this (Computer Simulation)
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"Spiegel-Online"....Beagle 2 auf dem Mars zerdeppert?
AP / © SPIEGEL ONLINE 2003
Longjack
Excerpt of another tune composed by British group Queen:
Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone and another one gone
Another one bites the dust yeah
From SpaceFlightNow.com's Mars Express site. The Beagle2 has gone tits up. I guess all the recent failures make the original Viking landers all the more impressive. Of course, you'd have to compare present-dollar costs of the Viking...
Let's see, 2 for $1 billion is $.5 billion per landing.
0 for $30 million is $ 'infinitely many' per landing. Well, that's arithmetic for you.
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