Missing defective BEAGLE FOUND ON MARS! Amazing claim The UK Space Agency revealed on Friday that the Beagle 2 - the ill-fated probe which went missing in December 2003 after being launched on 2 June that year - has been found. Dr David Parker, UK Space Agency CEO, told attendees at a UK Space Agency press conference today that "we can say with some confidence that Beagle 2 is no …
Yup. Something along the lines of "airbag failed to deploy" - which is the most likely scenario.
The parachute was jettisoned some distance above-ground to ensure it didn't end up settling on top of the lander or being blown onto it later.
Background: The airbag used for the mission was the SAME ONE used for terrestrial testing - the one which ruptured and had to be patched and then retested.
Normally there's no way you'd send a _prototype_ used airbag, but there was no money to make a new one. Beagle itself only flew because money was made available at the last possible minute (and far too late to order a new bag).
Because it'd been exposed to earth's atmosphere, the existing airbag needed to be dessicated(*) - this involves putting it in a vacuum chamber for several weeks and sucking out all the water vapour, after giving it a prolonged baking first. The bag was so saturated that a couple of vacuum pumps were destroyed by ice buildup and stupidly large quantities of water vapour were still coming out when time ran out and the bag had to be packed for flight.
The odds have always been that the thing simply hit the ground so hard that it broke stuff. This could have been avoided if the british govt was sensible about funding but the british space program is always hand-to-mouth and Pilinger only got sufficient funding to sort things out well after the deadlines for actually doing so.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2007/jan/20/accounts.saving
(*) Without dessication, there was a good chance the bag would either fail to inflate (solid lump of ice), or split when inflated, bearing in mind that even after martian reentry the thing would be sitting at -100C or so when the gas generator fired.
If a dozen Beagles had been built (marginal cost of doing so would be about twice the cost of the item sent - all the money is in R&D + prototyping), then 11 of them would probably have worked.
Disclosure: My employer was involved in a couple of parts of Beagle - and it was our vacuum pumps which got destroyed. The staff involved in that were predicting it'd crater before the rocket even left earth (the issue is that once a launch is scheduled, it happens regardless of whether particular items to go on it are ready. If Beagle hadn't been sent it would have been replaced by a block of lead, in order to avoid having to recalculate mass profiles.)
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Well, according to the taking head in the video "The mission could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as a failure" — which means, either he is very unimaginative or I am given to wild flights of fancy. Because I don't have to stretch my imagination very far at all to see a lander which did not work and disappeared without trace for 12 years as being *sort of* a "failure"
The petal opening system always looked terribly dodgy to me from the engineering point of view. It had to generate a large torque with very tiny actuators. Just look at the pic here.
Any deformation when it plopped on the ground or some sand in the hinges could make them stuck.
Or, even more simply, the battery has run out of charge while opening the petals one by one.
Looks like you may be onto something - the pic on the BBC website [ http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30784886 ] with the overlay seems to indicate that two of the petals didn't open or are otherwise missing. Don't know if they were just for power or if they contained the comm. equipment. It would be a bit of a bugger if it was otherwise functional but just unable to talk to us.
Edit - after reading the article it looks like they were required for both power and comms. From the BBC site above: "Without full deployment, there is no way we could have communicated with it as the radio frequency antenna was under the solar panels," explained Prof Mark Sims, Beagle's mission manager from Leicester University.
That's just bad luck, I feel extremely bad for them. Wish the professor could have known what happened.
What I find quite "shiver down the spine" inducing is to think that, at some time in the future — probably when most of us are long dead — when we've colonised The Moon and Mars, the people there will retrieve all these landing craft, buggies and explorers we've sent up over the years and will stick them in a museum somewhere, either there or back on Earth. Future generations yet unborn will gaze on them with a mixture of wonder and mild amusement at how they got as far as they did, using such antiquated and primitive technology. Just as we do at the exhibits of Victorian steam-powered contraptions in our own museums.
None of these artefacts is lost forever. They're just waiting for the archaeologists who will carry them home to be born.
(Pirate flag 'coz these will be long-lost treasure some day!)
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