Beagle 2 Probe found on Mars (Intact)

[MacLeod]

Thought lost on Chrstmas Day 2003, it looks like it has been found intact on by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It looks like the panels failed to fully deploy preventing contact. As to why perhaps we will never know until the site is visited.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30784886

 

[Melakon]

I was trying to post about this at about the same time, when Firefox decided to lose connect.

Maybe we can't get people up there right away, but wouldn't it be possible to build and send some kind of repair robot vehicle to assist it in deployment?

 

[MacLeod]

Whilst that would be feasible, would it not be better just to try again with another probe i.e Beagle 3. Rather than building a probe to repair another probe.

 

[RoJoHen]

Whilst that would be feasible, would it not be better just to try again with another probe i.e Beagle 3. Rather than building a probe to repair another probe.

Would it be possible to do both? A probe to fix Beagle2 that can also go off and do its own thing once that job is done?

 

[MacLeod]

Sure that would be possible, but if it is a deployment issue and if we could send a probe to complete the opening, would the probe come back to life. Though on the plus side it does seem as if it landed succesfully on Mars, which is a great achievment, It's just a shame that the person behind the porject didn't live to see the probe found intact on Mars. So what do we call this a succesful failure, a success it managed to land on Mars intact and a failure in that it failed to deploy fully.

 

[Melakon]

The mission itself would classify as a failure, but only because the probe didn't complete its assignment. Perhaps atmospheric conditions were worse than anticipated or it landed at the wrong angle.

 

[MacLeod]

True, it looks like it failed at the last hurdle, but it was believed to have crash landed on Mars, it could be something as simple as a rock preventing full deployment.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Sadly Colin Pillinger is no longer with us to hear about this, but he and his colleague Arthur Smith were correct—they did get it right.

As absurd as it is, I somehow wish someone would do a vain mission to revive the probe. The thing basically was one inch away from success. But I guess it's always this way with interplanetary missions—usually most of the things work out, it's one small thing that gets you. There are just a billion small things that can go wrong.

Not only interplanetary ones. SpaceX would have landed their rocket if their fins didn't run out of fluid.

 

[Count]

No point trying to repair it. 10 years exposed to the elements? If the solar panels aren't choked with dust or the electronics aren't damaged from the Martian cold/hot, the batteries have most likely lost their ability to hold a charge.

The only reason the active units survive so long on the red planet is they can deal with the various dust storms, flash freezes and the like that Mars throws at them by keeping themselves internally stable, if Beagle 2 hadn't deployed properly there is no chance that it'd be able to keep itself alive for 12 years, and even if it did, that's beyond the life expectancy of a standard mars mission anyway.

It's functionally, financially and professionally more appropriate to launch a Beagle 3, and maybe one day if a manned mission reaches mars, they can investigate the probe with a person out there, or just declare it as a memorial/marker.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Oh, that's obvious. I was thinking more about the romantic side of things, not about practical considerations. The man-made objects on the surface of Mars are probably the strangest thing that's up there, and the rover that landed intact and never communicated creates a strange excitement in me.

But sure since Beagle 2's landing site has been unexplored, it wouldn't kill you to send such Beagle 3 to the same landing site. And with the help of MRO we know there has been surface water in the area, in conditions somewhat not completely unfavourable to life. It's probably worth studying anyway, although there are likely better places to go that we've also mapped with the help of MRO, so it's not the greatest idea ever.