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Space Science

Beagle 2 Failure Analyzed 139

Posted by michael from the back-seat-drivers dept.
InsomniaCity writes "An inquiry into the loss of the Beagle 2 Mars probe in December will criticize the management of the project and the testing of the lander, says the BBC. Following the loss, the European Space Agency (Esa) and the British National Space Centre established a Commission of Inquiry, that are now recommending 19 things we need to remember for the future, from project management and fund raising, to high altitude testing of the parachute system. The commission, however, did not pinpoint any particular technical failure."
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Beagle 2 Failure Analyzed More

Beagle 2 Failure Analyzed

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  • Simple Error? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:07AM (#9223749)
    With how fast it was sent through production into use, it could have been something as simple as faulty programming.

    Maybe someone told it to use it's parachute at 5m instead of 5km? The world may never know.

    • Re:Simple Error? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mallardtheduck ( 760315 ) <stuartbrockman@NOsPAm.hotmail.com> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:28AM (#9223787)
      I agree.
      A few weeks before the launch, there was a doumentary on the BBC about the probe. It was basically a one-man struggle to get the thing there, despite tight deadlines. I also noticed that some of the critical equiptment, I think including the parachute that they used, remained untested. (The one they tested broke during testing!) It was amazing that it even got into space, but there were definately worries about wether it would work or not before it was launched.

      • Speed to market... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by lewko ( 195646 )
        The speed at which new technologies are rushed from design through to market is a concern.

        Admittedly technology that may have fatal consequences (like aircraft, flying machines and drugs)is usually subject to more regimented testing before release, but there is no shortage of products without such controls.

        How many of us end-users should have been called beta-testers instead (cough...mobile phones...operating systems etc.)?

        Unfortunately the rush to get the product to market before competition meant there
        • I think the ESA did want to get 'Mars Express', the orbiter that was Beagle's 'Mothership' to Mars before the NASA probes, but the launch date was already set before work on Beagle started. This meant that the Beagle team had a very tight and final deadline, so they did not have time to test everything fully.

        • I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @12:26PM (#9225125) Homepage
          I disagree, and it bothers me seing space agencies around the world trashed all the time. For example, NASA is a common punching bag for the Shuttle. Its predicted 18 million dollar launch cost, while looking great on paper, quickly swelled to 500 million per launch. Well, guess what? The Shuttle is pretty much par for the course. Almost all rocket programs have started out with grandiose dreams, and failed. Rocket launch costs, while fluctuating a lot, have remained relatively stable since the 1960s.

          I was debating with someone recently who kept insulting the shuttle, and referring to Ariane. I then showed the person how much of a disaster the Ariane program has been as well - Ariane 5 having three failures in 18 paid launches, the cost overruns driving their price up (not as high as the shuttle, but still not that great), the bailout of Arianespace, the cancellation of the ESC-B upper stage, etc. The person's response? They picked another rocket system to use as their champion, ignoring the fact that *it* had its own problems too.

          To make it worse, many of the people who trash space agencies treat ameteurs as if they're the ray of hope for the future. The ameteur rocket industry has been one failure after another, and has eaten enough dollars to fund some serious development at real space agencies. They're about to start getting their first major successes - and while they too have some very good people working for them, well, "Whoopee". When they've gotten several thousand designs into space hundreds or even thousands of times each, give me a call.

          We've had some truly brilliant people working at places like NASA, the ESA, etc., who have achieved incredible tasks. And while one may blame the management, guess what? Decisions have to be made. I heard someone the other day criticizing NASA for embarking on the Shuttle project and treating it as junk, while glorifying the never-made Sea Dragon. Well, how on earth was NASA supposed to predict that the Shuttle's costs would increase so dramatically due to technological problems not yet discovered? What makes one think that a rocket, "built like a ship", would have *less* technical problems? In fact, when SEALAR was built based on the Sea Dragon design, its performance figures were horribly downgraded and even still it ended up with serious structural failures that led to its cancellation. And the shuttle's costs aren't actually as bad, comparitively, as many people think - ~20,000$/kg, while the cheapest launches out there, using the latest tech, are ~10,000$/kg and are not man-capable.

          So give them a break, people. They're got some of the really intelligent people working very hard on an *incredibly* difficult task.
          • And those 'truly brilliant' people at NASA kept their damn mouths shut about problems there. If a few of them how spoken out, perhaps the shuttles would still be flying. But they didn't, they thought their jobs were more important than doing the right thing.

            • Re:I disagree (Score:3, Insightful)

              by TrentTheWiseA ( 566201 )
              The only problem with that is usually, you can do the right thing ONCE, and then you're out looking for another job. Whistleblower laws aren't truly effective enough to keep a determined supervisor from finding 'something' to terminate you over. If you're going to do the honorable thing, make sure it's the right honorable thing. You usually only get the chance to make the sacrifice once.

      • Re:Simple Error? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by tiger99 ( 725715 )
        Yes, I saw that, and feared the worst. The project was simply under-funded, which is why things did not get done. It was not due to any lack of technical competence. I have seen projects like this before, not necessarily involving space exploration, where those who control the cash supply something less than the absolute minimum necessary to to the job, with the inevitable result. Partly it happens because, especially in the UK, those who control the money usually have no scientific or technical ability wha

    • Re:Simple Error? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 )
      Well the a 5m parachute deployment because of faulty programming, or any other software error, is easily checked by going over the code.

      But, yes, your basic point is correct: Beagle 2, which only came about because of the sheer will and determination of a handful of dedicated individuals, and on a shoestring budget, was in space exploration terms a last minute afterthought. As such, it didn't have the time or budget for being test and retested several times before the mission launch date.

      • Re:Simple Error? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        No new lessons learned, just the old programming law:

        Faster, Better, Cheaper -- pick two.

        • Re:Simple Error? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by flossie ( 135232 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @06:28AM (#9224031) Homepage
          Faster, Better, Cheaper -- pick two.

          They did. They picked "faster" due to launch date constraints and "cheaper" because they couldn't get the necessary sponsorship to spend more money. There was never any great secret about it, but it would still have been much "better" than nothing if it had worked.

    • Re:Simple Error? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dizzle ( 781717 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:39AM (#9223812) Journal
      They should have made the code open source. THAT would have solved it!

      I can see it now: "b2Landing is software to successfully land a spacecraft on a distant planet. Development status: 0 - Borked/Need Money"

      • Re:Simple Error? (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Do you mean this [serve.com]? It can land on the Moon, Earth, and Jupiter! Only Mars needs to be implemented and then the ESA could use it!

      • Bad Idea (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ShadowRage ( 678728 )
        it would never meet the deadlines because of all the new features being put into it constantly.

        • i know you were just trying to be flip for a quick slant, but i don't for a minute believe that just because a space-delivery suite of tools was made 'open source', it would be constantly under weight of feature creep...

          there are -tons- of very well executed open source projects which set out specific, verifiable, real milestones, and then proceed to make those milestones...

    • Probably not a software error (Score:4, Interesting)

      by johannesg ( 664142 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @07:56AM (#9224188)
      That is a cause that's easy to rule out: just examine the software. And before you ask: yes, they kept a copy of the source around on Earth...

      The software was actually built by LogicaCMG. At work we received a christmas card from them (i.e. before it was known that the probe had failed), saying this:

      "LogicaCMG delivered the mission-critical software that controls Beagle 2 during the hazardous ride through the Martian atmosphere, releasing the heat shield and deploying parachutes and gas-filled air bags, slowing Beagle 2 down from its 14,000 mph/22,530 kph approach velocity to a safe landing on the surface of Mars"

      Or maybe not - but thanks for the card anyway ;-)

  • Exploring other worlds is expensive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) * on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:09AM (#9223755) Journal

    The cost of Beagle 2 varies (depending on who you ask) between 25 and 35 million pounds. Let's take an average of 30 million. The cost of the US Mars Rovers was 800 million for 2 (with savings on each because there were 2 of them). Right there is why Beagle 2 failed. Any failures in management are going to be mere perturbations on a delta-function graph - they had the best available technology, science, and equipment for the costs they could afford.

    It's interesting to note that Manchester United paid 30 million for Rio Ferdinand from Leeds United (this is English Premier League Football, for those not UK based) which sort of sums up the UK attitude to space travel. We pay roughly equivalent amounts to move a footballer about 65 miles as we do to send a robot explorer to a different planet in search of life....

    I think it all starts at a very early age. Sport is instinctively popular amongst kids and remains popular amongst adults. Science for kids is boring and dull (apart from Chemistry where once in a blue moon you get to blow something up). There are tables to learn, maths equations to solve, rules and laws to learn by rote. None of this is fun.

    As kids become adults, they keep their inhibitions about science ... Which is a more popular topic in a bar (or anywhere, really), the search for the Higgs Boson, or 'Who will win the league' ? Adults like the fact that 'hey, we went to the moon', but it's a transient 'win' for science. Within a week it's no longer important, and the mountain to climb to get back on the agenda has just got higher...

    The case for the prosecution of "boring science at school" rests, M'lud.

    Simon.
    • It's interesting to note that Manchester United paid 30 million for Rio Ferdinand from Leeds United (this is English Premier League Football, for those not UK based) which sort of sums up the UK attitude to space travel.

      I'm sure you could find a few US baseball players whose combined salaries exceeded the cost of their mars landers .. but despite the fact that the US public is far more interested in sport that space exploration, they still managed to land two probes on mars :-)

      Maybe the real issue is

      • Because of the high R&D costs associated with designing a space probe--it on average only costs 15% of what the first one cost to build a second one. Hence this was the reason behind the dual US rovers, the second one was also free relatively speaking. I would of made a lot of sense just to have had ESA chip in and make it three rovers instead of trying to design a whole new lander on a budget that almost assured a poor outcome. P.s. Stupidest idea of all: Not having telemetry during landing

    • Duh... (Score:4, Funny)

      by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:24AM (#9223780) Journal
      Which is a more popular topic in a bar (or anywhere, really), the search for the Higgs Boson, or 'Who will win the league'?

      When it's his turn to buy the drinks, the search for Higgs Boson wins hands down.

    • Re:Exploring other worlds is expensive (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "The cost of Beagle 2 varies (depending on who you ask) between 25 and 35 million pounds. Let's take an average of 30 million. The cost of the US Mars Rovers was 800 million for 2 (with savings on each because there were 2 of them). Right there is why Beagle 2 failed. Any failures in management are going to be mere perturbations on a delta-function graph - they had the best available technology, science, and equipment for the costs they could afford."

      You're correct on half of the problem where inadequate m
      • Since we could send up 50-odd Beagle 2s for the cost of the NASA Mars Rovers, it would make sense to do that.
        OTOH, if the same point-of-failure was inherent in all of them, that would be stupid.

        It seems that no-one is blaming cost. The project was feasible, but the timescale wasn't and management wasn't up to it.

    • Experience is just as important as funding (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm not so sure that funding is the sole source of ESA's woes. Of course, when you're only budgeting 1/30th the amount as your competitors, things aren't always going to work out.

      But consider the fact that ESA was founded in 1975 (May 30, 1975, to be exact. We're almost at the anniversary...) By this time, the USA had already tested numerous rockets, put men into space, and had landed men on the moon six years prior. The orbiter [nasa.gov] was already in development and the first "space shuttle" would be deployed les

    • Re:Exploring other worlds is expensive (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's interesting to note that Manchester United paid 30 million for Rio Ferdinand from Leeds United (this is English Premier League Football, for those not UK based) which sort of sums up the UK attitude to space travel. We pay roughly equivalent amounts to move a footballer about 65 miles as we do to send a robot explorer to a different planet in search of life....

      That 30million isn't real money though because it never really leaves the football transfer system. They may as well trade in shiny beads q

      • That 30million isn't real money though because it never really leaves the football transfer system. They may as well trade in shiny beads quite frankly. Player salaries however, are different as the payment becomes the property of the player to spend, presumably, in the general economy.

        That money was minted though - it came from somewhere (the rest of the economy). Let them switch to beads and give me the money!

        A good example of actual fake money is "market capitalization" or "$x million in stock" (wher

    • Manchester United paid 30 million for Rio Ferdinand from Leeds United (this is English Premier League Football,

      Bad example, Leeds is no longer premier league (at least after this season) and they desperately need the cash due to some very dodgy management.

      But back to the Beagle, I agree. At the same time, Football is a game frequently associated with dodgy accounting and poor management, however they make a fortune. Heavy science always costs a fortune, even 'lite' projects like Beagle. I thought the wh

      • Bad example, Leeds is no longer premier league (at least after this season) and they desperately need the cash due to some very dodgy management.

        Er - Leeds sold Rio in July 2002, the year after they were in the most prestigious footballing competition in the world - the Champions league! At the time, they were flying high. Granted, it was Icarus-like but that was due to later seasons not at the time...

        I think it's a great example :-)

        Simon

        • BRUSSELS (AP) - Scientists at the European Space Agency expressed regret today at reports that England defender Rio Ferdinand would not be selected for the Mars Express mission later this year. ESA based the decision on Ferdinand's failure to attend a scheduled drug test.

          It had been hoped that Ferdinand's free style would provide a much needed boost to Earth's defence record. Instead the ESA probe will use a European-style sweeper system based around either the Beagle 2 robot or David Seaman, depending whi
    • Right on the money. I don't put any value on enterntainment system based on pushing the envelope of human physical abilities. My colleagues at work don't understand me, in Canada you 'must' be a hokey fan and you 'must' drink beer after work. Well, I don't drink and I don't care for watching sports. Obviously this means that I have almost nothing incommon with the people I work with (I also have my own views on life and family in principle, which are considered to be antisocial and even sociopatic.)

      BTW
      • While I must admit to enjoying various alcoholic beverages I empathise entirely with regard to mass culture being based on idiocy like knocking balls about fields.

        I'm in the UK and here it's football. People ask if I'm watching the match at the weekend; I tell them I'm not interested in football and they go on to tell me what a shame such and such a team was beat last week and how great a season it's been for Blahblah United. My eyes glaze over while I nod politely, I reiterate that I don't much care for s
    • Umm, according to the artical time was the limiting factor. Beagle was added to the project very late and they did not have enough time to test the parachutes properly. So I presume that is what most likely caused the probe to fail.

    • I think it all starts at a very early age. Sport is instinctively popular amongst kids and remains popular amongst adults. Science for kids is boring and dull (apart from Chemistry where once in a blue moon you get to blow something up). There are tables to learn, maths equations to solve, rules and laws to learn by rote. None of this is fun.

      Real science isn't fun. (To most.) It involves thinking, reading, and mind numbingly boring repititive detail work. Nothing is going to change that. Edutainment on

  • Brilliant discoveries (Score:5, Funny)

    by lewko ( 195646 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:09AM (#9223756) Homepage
    They are recommending 19 things we need to remember for the future, including "testing of the parachute system".

    Am I the only one who can't believe they didn't think of this before?

    • Re:Brilliant discoveries (Score:5, Informative)

      by mallardtheduck ( 760315 ) <stuartbrockman@NOsPAm.hotmail.com> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:38AM (#9223808)
      Am I the only one who can't believe they didn't think of this before?

      And you would be right to not believe that they did not think of it. They did. They took it out to some desert and did a test drop. It failed. They damaged the parachute. Time constraints meant that they just had to use the untested spare parachute. This was all on a BBC documentary about the project.
      • "Well, we've just proven that it won't work. 10. . .9. . . 8. . . 7. . ."

        KFG

      • If they had thought of testing the parachute before they would have considered the idea that it might fail, and planed for time to build one that works. There is no point in doing a test if you can't make use of the results. They wasted time and money pretending to test the system.

        Yes I understand there were time pressures. I don't know what they could have done differently to make it work.

  • It was the name (Score:5, Funny)

    by imbezol ( 588268 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:25AM (#9223781) Homepage
    If they'd have named it Siamese, I'm sure it would have landed right.

    BigFiber.net [bigfiber.net]

  • bad name ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by drmancini ( 712059 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:31AM (#9223796) Homepage
    A couple of geeks from slashdot should have checked their documentation before they even built Beagle II ... They may have succeeded :) Obviously, they should have named it Slashdot I ...

  • Simple Things... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dozix007 ( 690662 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @04:35AM (#9223804)
    I realize this is not an American probe, but the American example of Metric\American system is a prime example of things that generally go wrong on these type of missons. Generally simple, easy to avoid things are the prime kickers. While hind site is 20/20, I think some increased quality control would be quite usefull.

    • Re:Simple Things... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MoonFog ( 586818 )
      Well, this: But the project faced severe time pressures and not all its components were tested to the complete satisfaction of its engineers. is another prime example imo. How many times as a CS student haven't I heard about time schedules and pressure. It's also kind of scary that they are willing to send out a probe like that without testing it to the "satisfaction of its engineers". That's a lot of wasted tax payers money.

      • Re:Simple Things... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by flossie ( 135232 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @06:40AM (#9224057) Homepage
        That's a lot of wasted tax payers money.

        In your opinion, perhaps. This was a high risk, high reward programme from the very beginning. There was never any secret that there was a fairly high probability that it would not be successful; it was a project based on hope rather than expectation. However, it would be unfair to say that it has not acheived anything. Much of the work may be useful in designing future landers but, more importantly, the project fired the imagination of the British public. I think it is far more likely now that there will be another, better funded, attempt to land on Mars than if this project had never taken place.

        • I'm not saying they didn't achieve anything, but wouldn't it be worth it to stretch the timescale and perhaps invest a bit more money to make sure that things were up to the standard they should be?

          • Re:Simple Things... (Score:2, Informative)

            by AlecC ( 512609 )
            Stretching the timescale was simply not an option. It was a passenger on Mars Ezpress, which was going to launch in a particular narrow window because of the relative positions of Mars and Earth. The options were 1: fit it into the time available, 2: cancel.

      • That's a lot of wasted tax payers money.
        $50 millions US dollars might as well be pennies. It's very sad that the mission failed, but this is just not a waste of any substantial amount of money. Hopefully the UK space program has learned a few things and can try again based on what they've learned. I bet it costs more than 50 million to introduce a new food product (and I bet most of those fail too).

        The cost is probbably more in moral and PR for the UK space program. NASA suffered from this a few yea

      • Engineers are never satisfied. Trust me, 100% satisfaction never happens. Management has to guess from our reports when the risk of failure is low enough to ship.

        That said, somethings deserve more attention than others. If the probe had landed correctly and the radios worked, but nothing else that would still be worth more than if it had landed correctly everything else would work. So priority needs to be put on landing and radios. (if nothing else you can get some data just based on signal strength

    • Re:Simple Things... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Vellmont ( 569020 )

      I think some increased quality control would be quite usefull.

      And I'm sure the engineers who designed it would agree with you 100%. The root problem as another poster pointed out was there wasn't enough money to do that. The budget was shoestring $50 million. You can't go to mars for less than it costs to make a movie [imdb.com] about going to mars.

      • Re:Simple Things... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tmortn ( 630092 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @07:46AM (#9224170) Homepage
        actually you can. Granted to probe wasn't completely successfull but it most certainly did get to mars for less than the cost of a movie about going to mars.
        • Ah yes, taking statements too literally. You know what I meant, you're just being picky.
          • My response had little to do with taking your statements too litterally. I was responding to the spirit of your comment indicating that the mission was doomed to failure simply due to the amount spent. Their is no law stating that a mars mission has to cost X dollars. Hell had the rovers failed that same argument could have been used for them, they were very economic by comparison to other ventures.

            So, I really do not think I was being picky at all. Simply reaching the planet for the amount of money spent

            • Re:Simple Things... (Score:3, Informative)

              by Vellmont ( 569020 )
              The Beagle II piggybacked on the Mars Express spacecraft. It could have been a rock and would have gotten to mars. That in itself is just not an accomplishment.

              If it actually would have worked, sure that would have been a great accomplishment. I don't know about being doomed to failure, but given the money and limited testing it should be fairly obvious that it's not highly likely it'll succeed. That's fine, not everything has to suceed. For only 50 million, you try again later from what you've learn
              • Eh, hitting something 40 million miles away is an accomplishment in my book be it a rock or a Rover impersonating one. However, I agree piggybacking makes it less of one... IE they didn't accomplish the task with the 50 million but paid for a ride on the technology that accomplished that.

                Giants and shoulders and all that. Sloppy effort or simply underfunded I really find much to be excited about with the Beagel II launch. Lowering the bar and being willing to take risks is something that has to happen. Now
        • ...probe wasn't completely successfull...

          Well, the movie wasn't either.

  • I am a bit amazed that they tested everything individually but didn't do an end to end testing.
    I realize that they were on a tight schedule. I wonder if they performed environmental testing under extreme conditions? The article didn't mention it but it is really important. Especially since I doubt the mars atmospere resembles the weather in Great Britain.
    I think it would be cool if they gave it another go.

  • I wonder, actually, does anybody know if there are some standarts followed in such projects?

    As for example in software development, the CMM is quite common nowadays, I know it's roots are somewhere deep in the defence/aerospace industry... So knowing it, I is hard to imagine, that organisation following even harder guidelines (I hope) and employing well educated (I presume) and motivated (of course) people, can overlook issues as properly testing the parachutes, and other mission critical elements...

    Of co
    • Well,

      CMM is *known* just like smeltery and pottery is *known*.

      CMM is a kind of measure how able you are to do software or other engineering work. So *knowing* it is not enough, you have to apply it.

      CMM has 5 levels ... or five digits on your measure meter. Level 1 is the lowest and level 5 the highest. On level 5 are world wide about 10 to 15 software development departments.

      Even on level 3 are only about 35% of all software engineering departments(companies).

      Basicly: the majority of development labs d

  • Learn spelling (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's ESA not Esa, do U write Usa???, michael: -1 point.
    • Why do "U" write "you" as "U"?

    • My take on this is that it depends how you pronounce it. I do sometimes say EEe-sir, so Esa would be correct. I never say Yoo-sir, so it is USA. If you want to enforce Ee-Ess-Eh, it should be ESA.

      After all, the original purpose of script was to represent speech. So it makes sense to use the extra flexibility of capitalisation to convey information about speech.
      • I don't know... everytime I see ESA, I pronounce it "Eh-Es-Ah" (for all you Americans out there).

        Fact is, that even when you pronounce the object out, such as "NASA" you still capitalize all of it, because it's an acronym. If you applied your rules, then it become inconsistant, where anyone can say, "I say Yousah, so I can write it Usa".

        Your logic thusly fails.

  • What a load of garbage. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tsotha ( 720379 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:10AM (#9223880)
    Every time something bad happens the Monday-morning quarterbacks come out of the woodwork. If you read the article you see they don't have any idea what went wrong, but they have all sorts of expensive ideas on how to fix the problem.

    Space missions are risky and expensive. You can spend lots of extra money and have the mission fail anyway. And there's a danger of it getting cancelled altogether if you spend too long testing.

    • Re:What a load of garbage. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 2004 @05:16AM (#9223893)
      Entirely fair comment (I work in the "industry" concerned). One thing to remember with Beagle/Mars Express and many other interplanetaries is the Launch date is FIXED by orbital motions and that puts some pressure on development and testing.
      • As I recall the software for the current mars rovers wasn't even complete before it was launched. They had to upload it remotely while it was in transit.

        And then of course when they filled up their flash ram and crashed the computers, that required another remote software upgrade...
  • ...the British scientific information ministers finally admitted it failed?? I thought they were holding out hope until the 2038 rollover.

  • Blame (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jjeffrey ( 558890 )
    I hope no-one blames Professor Pillinger for this. He did a great job under the circumstances and he deserves a chance to try again - this time with funding and commitement from ESA.
  • It sounds like the sort of thing that would happen if it was a project at my uni: under-funded, lack of experts, people leaving things to the last minute or having too tight a schedule, that sense of "oh shit this is so much work the deadlines tomorrow, lets just solder all this crap together and get it done" and not enough strict planning and organisation. I don't know who's fault it really was, or why i keep seeing this sort of thing happening, maybe we've lost the knack - we used to rule half the world a

  • Er (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lpontiac ( 173839 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @07:21AM (#9224122)

    I remember reading a few years ago about the "new" approach to space exploration. Instead of sending less probes, they (the space agencies) would be sending more, cheaper probes. The idea being that yes, there would be a higher proportion of failures, but when offset against the increased number of missions overall, we'd end up with a higher (number of successful missions) / (total expenditure across all missions).

    A similar idea crops up in the manned versus unmanned debate - "unmanned exploration is cheaper because amongst other things, you don't have to be as sure the spacecraft won't fail because there's no human life at stake."

    We've now got our numerous, cheaper (Beagle cost 50 million pounds), unmanned missions. But when half of them fail (der!), people get into a kink!

  • Hopefully one of those 19 things is . . . (Score:3, Funny)

    by edward.virtually@pob ( 6854 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @07:38AM (#9224154)
    Next time, don't program it to land [cnn.com] in [msn.com] a [spaceflightnow.com] crater [space.com]. NASA was lucky that their similarly boneheaded failure to include filesystem cleanup code in their Mars landers was repairable.
  • Would have been nice if they were listed.
    • The first 10 points on the list:

      1) load batteries before lanch.
      2) Check if Bob's children haven't left toys in the space probe.
      3) Make sure that the coffee contains cafeine.
      4) Check if the diagrams aren't upside down.
      5) Make sure nobody involved in the project has bought their Ph D online.
      6) Don't hide porn in the technical manuals. That means you Bob!
      7) No alcohol use at work. Bob, put down that bottle!
      8) Use SI units. Don't invent new ones.
      9) The law of nature apply everywhere and everytime. Don
  • Being British, the main problem with Beagle was that those UK scientists, instead of using heavy-duty airbags like the US landers, simply wrapped the Beagle lander in whoopee cushions ... allowing it to bounce and fart its way across the martian landscape. However a crucial layer of sound insulating bubble wrap was left off in error, and too avoid total humiliation of the British people from this awful Monty Python-style soundtrack, the lander was destroyed on its first landing fart.

  • Failure? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @08:12AM (#9224219)
    I wouldn't call Beagle 2 a failure. It didn't accomplish it's scientific goals but it proved that a small group of people with all the odds against them can produce a high quality spacecraft (and it was a high quality piece of kit, excluding perhaps the parachute) and get it to another world.

    And it did get to Mars! Sure, it landed much like a bowl of petunias falling from several miles would -- but the fact that it flew at all was the amazing thing. Keep an eye out for the BBC documentary on the whole mission to get an idea of what I mean.

    My message to the Beagle 2 team: It's difficult getting to Mars, and for your first attempt you did really well. Better luck next time!

    • Re:Failure? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 )
      Not to mention that the lander was only part of the mission, and the orbiting spacecraft seems to work rather well...

    • And it did get to Mars! Sure, it landed much like a bowl of petunias falling from several miles would -- but the fact that it flew at all was the amazing thing.

      Except that the "flying to Mars" bit was an accomplishment of the Mars Express [esa.int], not of the Beagle.

    • I wouldn't call Beagle 2 a failure. It didn't accomplish it's scientific goals

      In other words it...failed?
    • And it did get to Mars! Sure, it landed much like a bowl of petunias falling from several miles would -- but the fact that it flew at all was the amazing thing.
      Beagle 2 only got to Mars because someone else gave it a lift. It's not amazing at all that Beagle 2 got there, as it did none of the work getting there, and slept over 99% of the transit time.

    • Re:Failure? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kwan3217 ( 145249 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @02:22PM (#9225676)
      Beagle 2 was a 100% failure. Nothing at all was learned from it. It sent back zero bits of science, and accomplished zero of its mission goals. It also returned zero bits of engineering data after it was released and switched from being a payload to an independent spacecraft. This means no one can even tell what went wrong.

      How can you tell that Beagle was high quality? Once it was released, how was Beagle distinguishable from an equivalent mass of bricks? How is it distinguishable from puting 30 million pound notes in a bag and dropping it from Mars Express?

      Basically all we learned is that that particular spacecraft team with that particular budget on that particular schedule cannot build a successful lander. Even then we cannot be sure, because Beagle may have just had bad luck. An identical spacecraft targeted a few meters away may have had a different result. We just don't know.

      Nothing was learned, nothing was gained. Everyone knew it was a high risk mission, and they crapped out. This doesn't mean they shouldn't try again, but don't try to sugarcoat it.
  • Surely we should have sent another 4 of these things up to mars by now? Release early, release often. That ways we'd probably be getting loads of bug reports from the Martians.

  • Altimeter problems (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, 2004 @08:25AM (#9224254)
    I saw one of the beagle-2 flight spares last week. It was displayed and discussed at the university department where I work.

    One suggestion for the loss of the craft was that the barometric altimeter, which was to deploy the parachute, was fooled by an unseasonal sand storm in the Martian atmosphere. The altimeter had to trigger the chute quite late in the descent, and the low pressure associated with the storm may have inhibited the deployment until the craft hit the ground.

    Since Beagle had no engines, it couldn't go into parking orbit until the storm went away.

  • Project Management (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Asahi Super Dry ( 531752 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @08:34AM (#9224278)
    Wouldn't surprise me at all if bad management led to the failure. I'd never grasped the value of good management until my current job, which lacks it. Not that I'm any kind of great programmer, but I always felt before that the burden of success was mine, 100%, when in fact it's a lot less than that. The people making the higher level decisions (resource/time allocation, features, scope, requirements) are the ones who can really fuck things up. Heh, that seems pretty trite now that I've typed it...
  • Pinpoint George Bush somehow.

  • The British Research System (Score:5, Informative)

    by MROD ( 101561 ) on Saturday May 22, 2004 @09:30AM (#9224445) Homepage
    The problems decribed here are endemic to the way what little money is available for British scientific research is distributed.

    I work for the Earth Sciences department at Oxford University, one of the very best funded Universities in the UK, yet much of the time which should be spent on research by lecturers and postdoctural research staff is tied up with the beaurocracy of funding. Not only this but the funds available to keep the departments running, ie. the infrastructural costs, are going down year on year.

    I feel for Professor Pillinger. He did the best job of getting funding he could. It's highly unlikely that he would have be able to get more managerial help from anyone in the current circumstances and the only person who could have publicised the whole thing was himself.

    If the research council and funding bodies are anything like NERC, they only want research which already knows the results (ie. pointless) and is preferably one of the fashionable subjects (currently climate change and the environment).

    Please note that I am speaking on behalf of myself and not in any way on behalf of the University of Oxford or the Department of Earth Sciences. All of the opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any group within the University of any policy thereof.

  • My theory (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Saturday May 22, 2004 @11:42AM (#9224919) Journal
    Is that the problem was caused be the absolutely bizarre perception that somehow releasing what was essentially a dead weight with absolutely no propulsion gear on board (due to mass constraints for this mission, as far as I am aware) to do things like minor course correction from several million miles above the surface of the planet would have anything but a practically infinitesmal chance of actually landing correctly. If Beagle2 had landed as intended, it would not have been due to good engineering or science, it would have been on account of absolutely spectacular luck - on the order of the kind of luck it would take to be hit by a large vehicle moving at highway speeds (and that hadn't started to slow down), and walk it off a few moments later, essentially merely having had the wind knocked out of you - ie, possible, but absolutely incredulous. Perhaps it is a good thing that this first attempt didn't succeed, as it will hopefully give them a better opportunity to examine fundamental errors in the design of the mission instead of being too hasty to blame it equipment malfunctions.

    At least they realize that tracking it during decent is something they should do from now on.

  • Being that it was their first probe, perhaps they should have cut down on the number of gizmos so that they had money and weight to have better landing systems.

    Rather than include a dozen experiments, maybe just have 2 or 3. For example, just focus on detecting life instead of x-ray spectrometers etc.

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