The Beagle was meant to land on Mars early on Christmas Day
Posted on 12/27/2003 12:58:44 AM PST by RWR8189
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The Beagle was meant to land on Mars early on Christmas Day
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There has been no signal detected from the surface of Mars on Friday that would indicate the UK-built Beagle 2 lander got down safely.
The US orbiter Mars Odyssey flew over the assumed landing zone just after 1800 GMT but heard no transmission.
The giant radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in northwest England also failed to make contact after listening to the planet for hours on Friday evening.
Scientists refuse to give up hope and will continue to scan Mars for a call.
Team leader Professor Colin Pillinger said he had faith Beagle had landed safely, adding: "We will hang on testing and waiting."
Both Odyssey and Jodrell will continue their sweep in the coming days. Other radio telescopes including one at Stanford in California and at Westerbourg in the Netherlands have offered to help in the search.
If Beagle 2 is alive it will transmit at a frequency of 401.56 Mhz.
Blocked line
Long-term, the Mars Express [Beagle's mothership, which carried it into space and set it loose about a week ago] should be in position to try to make contact with its "baby" on 4 January.
Mother and child were designed to talk to each other and a communication with Mars Express may be the best hope.
"We're still early days in extra time," said Professor Pillinger.
If it had landed safely, Beagle was designed to survive on its automated systems for weeks, if not months, he said.
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 It's very much like sending somebody a love letter - you know they've got it and you're waiting for their response
Professor Colin Pillinger
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"So we're not concerned about not being able to contact it.
"If we can contact it, we can pull this thing round. But it's very much like... sending somebody a love letter. You know they've got it and you're waiting for their response."
Scientists say there are a number of possible explanations for Beagle's failure to call home.
Perhaps the most likely is that Beagle 2 landed off course, in an area where communication with Mars Odyssey is difficult, if not impossible.
Another possibility is that the transmission from the lander's antenna is blocked from reaching Mars Odyssey or the ground-based telescopes.
Wrong time
Beagle 2 was targeted to land in a large lowland basin called Isidis Planitia at 0254 GMT on 25 December.
The "pocket watch" design of Beagle 2 ensured that it would turn upright irrespective of which way up the little lander fell. Soon after, the onboard computer was expected to send commands to release the clamp band, open the lid and begin transmission.
Precisely.
Never assume a conspiracy when simple incompetance will explain it.
You worked in a prosecutor's office for a while, during your schooling.
Ergo, massive conspiricies to purposefully fail abound in the space agencies of the world.
The logic astounds, boggles, shakes the mind.
Ah! Therefore you have some proof of your paranoic claims......!
(waiting....)
(waiting....)
It's time for the British to put Professor Quatermass on the job!
However -- and once again -- your logic is impeccable.
Your argument can be distilled to:
Yeah, I can see how 1) and 2) yield 3). The logic is dazzling! I am thunderstruck! Awed! AMAZED!
I didn't mean to fail! I'm sorry!
He must've saw you wearin' those goatskin leggings.
Interesting, Richard C. Hoagland (who has lots of tinfoil hat comments about Mars space missions) actually took off his tinfoil hat and said something on the Coast to Coast AM radio show last night that makes considerable sense: Beagle 2 was essentially a very cheaply-developed component of the Mars Express spacecraft that was essentially added to the spacecraft almost literally at the last moment of the design of Mars Express. Because it was so cheaply developed, they never had the time to test all the components of the landing system, and if any one part of the landing system failed the whole Beagle 2 lander would have crash-landed on the surface of Mars in a couple of thousand pieces. Now, if the two NASA landers that will land on Mars on 3 January 2004 and 24 January 2004 failed to function, that would be a very different story indeed.
Anyway, the most important part of Mars Express--the orbiter with its state-of-the-art sensors--is functioning correctly and is now undergoing a slow retrobraking process using its onboard manuevering thrusters to adjust its orbit from its currently highly-elliptical path and also move it to a near-polar orbit. That should be completed by the end of January 2004, in which time the sensors on Mars Express will its its high-resolution camera (including stereoscopic views), infrared camera, and imaging radar to carefully look at every detail of Mars' surface--especially looking for water.
| Daryl L. Hunter - Editor |
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