back to article 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 …

  1. petur

    Next step

    Drive a rover over there and get some images to see/learn what went wrong (and maybe try to switch it off and on again?)

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Next step

      If you sent Rover, it'd spend the next however long just sniffing the Beagle's bum.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Happy

        Re: Next step

        This might just work ... when it disappeared my theory was that it was sitting on Mar with a screen saying something along the lines of "Press any key to continue .... "

        1. Message From A Self-Destructing Turnip

          Re: Next step

          Is the fact that the lander is here and the parachute over there a clue as to what might have gone wrong?

          1. Alan Brown Silver badge

            Re: Next step

            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.)

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Next step

        It's been there a while now, so it's probably acquired a wheel clamp and a "Council Aware" sticker.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Next step

        We have a winner. No further submissions are required or necessary.

    2. ZSeriesOrBust

      Re: Next step

      If you sent a Rover, it would break down part the way and rust to bits by the time you got parts for it.

      1. Velv
        Coat

        Re: Next step

        Now that they know the location, they could call out the AA.

        Although I think you might need to be standing next to it with your membership card.

        (Sheldon, The Big Bang Theory)

    3. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Re: Next step

      Well, we are half the way there, there was a successful launch of a Reliant Robin. Now which Rover model shall we chose...

  2. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Busby

      Re: Bummer

      Yep the thing travelled an immense distance taking more than six months and then something went wrong at the last minute. I bet the people involved are still absolutely gutted.

      1. Phuq Witt
        Facepalm

        Re: Bummer

        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"

  3. MJI Silver badge

    partially unfurled

    So almost a success.

    What a disappointment for 12 years ago.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: partially unfurled

      12 YEARS!

      Man. Where did my life go? I could swear it was about 6, if not 5.

  4. Artifixprime
    Terminator

    Any sign of Decepticon footprints?

  5. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

    Cute design but risky

    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.

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Cute design but risky

      Seems wasteful having that large surface area parachute canopy... now if there was a material that was, say, flexible and photovoltaic, bonded to a polymer that became rigid after being heated by the descent through the atmosphere...

      Hmm....

    2. YouStupidBoy

      Re: Cute design but risky

      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.

    3. ravenviz Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: Cute design but risky

      The image in the video seems to show the 'lid' and a single petal had deployed. You do wonder if the vibrations of the landing could have distorted the apparatus somehow to create a simple mechanical obstruction to full deployment.

  6. mmeier

    And boy was that some backbreaking work

    Lugging the wreck from the "Reichsflugscheibe" to the area where it was to be found and then covering all the traces. Almost as bad as back in 67 when that Armstrong guy almost landed on an outlying defence installation and had to be divertet...

    1. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

      Re: And boy was that some backbreaking work

      I'm sure all will be revealed in good time as their Kickstarter campaign to fund the sequel has been successful.

    2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: And boy was that some backbreaking work

      "Almost as bad as back in 67 when that Armstrong guy almost landed on an outlying defence installation and had to be divertet..."

      That was one hell of a diversion! Life support for an extra two years?

  7. Phuq Witt
    Pirate

    The Shape of Museum Exhibits to Come

    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!)

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: The Shape of Museum Exhibits to Come

      I've just looked it up on Wikipedia, and there's an image of the exhibit there from Liverpool Spaceport...

      HOW DID THEY KNOW?!!!

    2. Simon Harris

      Re: The Shape of Museum Exhibits to Come

      As the first British craft to land on Mars, it'll probably be designated a National Trust site.

    3. Little Mouse

      Re: The Shape of Museum Exhibits to Come

      Re: "They're just waiting for the archaeologists who will carry them home"

      Only if they haven't already been cannibalised for spare parts by stranded Martian astronauts....

  8. Simon Harris
    Coat

    Scientists recall trying to listen for Beagle's call sign...

    ... but it's all a bit of a Blur.

  9. hatti

    Are you sure the image is not a close up of someones coffee table with woodworm poo?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Always amused..

    That the UK Space Centre is in Swindon - that well known hub of extra-terrestrial[1] life

    [1] Well - maybe not ET - but certainly not regular earth-life.

  11. Van

    The tune has changed it a bit around here, from the one claiming this was just a dustbin lid that at best left a nice new crater in Mars. Tw#ts.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re. hinge

    This is possible, or a micrometeor hit in the hinge area would have done for it.

    The impact with the ground might have finished it off but the damage was already done long before Beagle 2 even got to Mars..

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