Beagle 2. Arse. £45 million damp squib?

[Urban Ranger]

The official website

[Sandman]

A pity. But if the main orbiter part of the probe doesn't crash, then we'll have a 50% success rate. Better than the Russians, anyway.

[Az]

no, Sandman, because landing is the part that counts.

[Sandman]

The landing was a sideshow, not the main event.

[Drake Tungsten]

Sure it was...

[DanS]

This sure is a shame, if the problem isn't worked out. But I think the key with Mars exploration is putting a number of probes there and keeping with a program in spite of a lot of disappointments. Mars is like the Bermuda triangle of space.

How many probes has Europe sent to Mars so far?

[Ned]

Man, the lack of success of most recent Mars missions has to illustrate that there is some basic know how that we either do not have or have forgotten, as the older missions by the US were largely successful.

[MikeH]

More recent policy has been to make cheaper expendable missions rather than massively expensive ones. The theory being that if you can send a cheap probe for 1/3 the cost then you can afford for 2/3 to fail. This European one is relatively very cheap.

[Ned]

MikeH, like I said, that "faster and cheaper" approach ignores critical details that eventually end up biting you. There is an old saying at the Indianapolis Speedway to the effect that defective sparkplug can cause the failure of any thoroughbred racer. The people who win those races are the people whose cars are running at the end. Those are never the cars that are designed and tested on the cheap.

[General Ludd]

We should run future space prodes around the indy 500 before launch, next time.

[Tripledoc]

From the official website.

Current status
28-Dec-2003
01:20 GMT

No signal received by the Stanford University telescope but equipment was not operating at its highest level of performance.

Like I said before, the Mars Express has still not tried to make contact, and only contact between Beagle 2 and Mars Express was tested before launch. I wonder why.

4th Jan 2004 is the Earliest signal retrieval from the lander via Mars Express.

[Ecthy]

the US one probably hit the EU one an both are broken. Chinese one flies by and laughs arse off.

[child of Thor]

Maybe its David Bowie's kids messing up the probes as they land

But its a shame - i much prefer we spend millions on this kind of faliure than on equaly expensive weapons systems to kill (usually) civilians in far of countries

COME ON BEAGLE! - where the hell are you?

[The Viceroy]

I read some time ago that one of the reasons that craft entering into the atmosphere of mars (for landing) fail so often is because the martian atmosphere is not the same shape as the planet, and so you cannot assume the distance from ground to first entry point to be constant. This can seriously muck up your distance calculations if your relying on atmospheric readings to judge distance.

I wonder if the Europeans had considered that ?