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Beagle 2 Official Inquiry Released
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Feb 06, 2005 06:21 AM
from the unfortunately-only-lassie-can-read-it dept.
from the unfortunately-only-lassie-can-read-it dept.
smasch writes "The ESA/UK Commission of Inquiry into Beagle 2 has released their
report (PDF) on why the Mars lander Beagle 2 failed. While the report does not name a single cause for the failure, it does name several problems including the lack of funding, lack of margin in the design, and treating Beagle 2 as a scientific instrument rather than as a spacecraft. The report also made nineteen recommendations to prevent these sorts of failures on future missions. We have previously mentioned the Beagle 2 failure, although the official report was not released to the public at that time.
The original story from MarsToday.com is available here."
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Sod 'em (Score:5, Informative)
Professor Pillinger rejected the inquiry's findings as "wisdom after the event". He said: "The gains we could have made from Beagle far outweighed the risks."
Lessons learned report (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lessons learned report (Score:4, Funny)
your calculations (thanks NASA & Lockheed)
Parent
Just a guess. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Just a guess. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just a guess. (Score:4, Informative)
Here is the official site for details about that image: http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/08/31/ [msss.com]
Parent
I would like to appologise. (Score:2, Funny)
Where from here? (Score:1, Funny)
Funding, Design were major problems for Beagle 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Add to that the attempt to design the Beagle 2 as a "bolt-on" experiment instead of a separate spacecraft (which it would be during separation, re-entry and landing) meant that the Beagle 2 was doomed. The myriad possible failure modes highlight how bad this decision was.
Of course, because no one thought to have telemetry from the Beagle 2 once it separated - only after it landed safely - the only way anyone will ever figure out what really went wrong will be to recover the pieces and do a physical analysis. If those future explorers discover there were multiple failure modes, I wouldn't be surprised.
No government will send explorers to find out. Instead, some Richard Branson-like people (i.e. rich nerds) will get together on their vacation to Mars and mount an expedition to the wreckage site and announce the results to the press.
Re:Funding, Design were major problems for Beagle (Score:2, Insightful)
The report cites repeated reviews finding highlighting those funding and design issues, yet no action was ever taken on most of it.
Add to that a schedule with effectively zero margin for error, no central organization to manage the disparate groups (or sort out the fights when Martin Baker and Astrium couldn't work things out), and inadequate documentation, and you have a guaranteed disaster.
You can't build a complicated system without command, control and
Groups of three (Score:4, Interesting)
This way, if one lander loses the ability to communicate with the orbiters or with Earth, or even two of them lose it, the third can relay their data. If something goes wrong on a lander, debugging should become far easier if you can still communicate with the broken system.
The scientific instruments could be distributed among them, each carrying roughly a third of the load. This would greatly reduce the size and weight of each lander, and this in turn would simplify the parachute system, the landing system, and many other parts.
Alternatively each lander could have the same weight, with a more varied range of instruments. The Beagle2 systeem is already impressively small and versatile.
Some instruments might be repeated on two landers or on all three, especially some very small and lightweight instruments.
If the landers are small and light enough, all three can travel on the same ship from Earth to Mars. In fact, I think on a single ship you could send several groups with three landers each.
Re:Groups of three (Score:5, Insightful)
Not everything will run perfectly - NASA dropped a fragile disc into the desert at 500m/s last year if you remember. But we can't afford to build double redundancy into already expensive spacecraft.
Parent
Re:Groups of three (Score:3, Insightful)
Note that the Beagle2 rover was just a small part of the Mars Express spacecraft that went to Mars.
A rover would be great! But it's also more risky, and far more expensive. The Beagle2 system was impressively cheap. With redundancy we could get success at a far lower cost than with a rover.
I do feel that Europe should eventually send rovers, but perhaps not in its first mission lan
Re:Groups of three (Score:2)
It wasn't falling nearly that fast.
500 m/s would be faster than the speed of sound. In reality is was falling at about 200 mph (around 89m/s)
Re:Groups of three (Score:2)
that means genesis would have crashed into the ground at about mach 1.5.
no, genesis crashed at 89m/s (200mph).
your guess was better than this guy's [slashdot.org] though.
Re:Groups of three (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Groups of three (Score:2)
If I may be so bold... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Groups of three (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know if that would have saved the mission. The report clearly hints that the failure could have been a design error due to bad management/lack of funding/lack of testing/lack of time. From the TFInquiry:
-Air-bag design not robust and the testing programme not sufficient;
-Risk of collision between the back
Re:Groups of three (Score:2)
But I read somewhere that among all the Mars lander missions, only one out of three succeeded. I'm guessing that many of them were carefully made, and failed because they encountered unexpected difficulties.
Re:Groups of three (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the original idea, I'm somewhat confused how having 3 probes all land near each other would improve communication. They already have satellites in orbit to relay communications, how would having another lander nearby help?
Re:Groups of three (Score:2)
The way I understand it, the Beagle2 antenna for communication from ground to orbit is directional, communication works only when the orbiting craft is almost directly overhead. This means that communication is impossible during descent, and also fails if the lander breaks, for instance by landing on a sharp rock, or if the "clam" fails to open, or if it lands on a steep slope or a rock that makes the antenna po
Re:Groups of three (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Groups of three (Score:2, Funny)
Cotcha trying to imagine a beowulf cluster of probes
NETLANDER mission (Score:2)
Links:
http://smsc.cnes.fr/NETLANDER/ [smsc.cnes.fr]
http://ganymede.ipgp.jussieu.fr/GB/projets/netland er/ [jussieu.fr]
Re:Groups of three (Score:2)
Locomotion (Score:5, Interesting)
The instrument arm is strong enough to lift the instrument package. This strength might be enough to let it push down firmly on the ground, maybe 10 cm away, and then pull itself forward.
Maybe it couldn't pull along all the solar cell parts, maybe it would have to leave them behind, connected through an electric cable.
There's nothing in the description of Beagle2 that suggests that they have thought of this possibility.
Critical lesson (Score:2, Funny)
Freedom of Information Act request by NewScientist (Score:5, Informative)
The article can be read here [newscientist.com]
Lack of funding is no reason for failure (Score:4, Insightful)
Projects fail for inadequate project management, improper planning, a flaw in the design or execution. Spending more money and having more resources makes identifying and correcting these things _easier_ but is not a failure condition for the project.
Look at the amazing strides people have made with no 'funding' save their own ingenuity and drive. Certainly the British Space Program could have, with the very same financial resources allocated differently, either identified during the design phase that they did not have enough resources to move forward or else designed a successful misssion.
It's all about the Product Development Life Cycle (Define->Design->Develop->Deploy) and the interrelation of Time-Scope-Resources that allows a project to define two of the three, but the third one is defined by the other two. (If I need scope S completed in time T then I cannot also define budget B)
Re:Lack of funding is no reason for failure (Score:2)
Maybe we're just arguing semantics, but I think you can certainly say that lack of money was one of the reasons Beagle failed. For example, the air bag system was tested once ... and failed. The design was modified, but they didn't have enough money to do a second test.
Re:Lack of funding is no reason for failure (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Lack of funding is no reason for failure (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Lack of funding is no reason for failure (Score:2)
Of course when you are forced to do things "on the cheap" you will "end up cutting corners". Who disagrees with that?
What I _do_ disagree with is that lack of funding is a reason to fail. Lack of funding, as you pointed out, is a reason to do things efficiently. But with few resources, the program still could have allocated them in a way such as to know in the design and planning stage that the project was n
Blackwash (Score:5, Interesting)
The ESA - European Space Agency - are supposed to be like NASA, in charge of all EU space activity.
The ESA, who were sidelined by Beagle 2, have been asked to produce the report into why Beagle 2 failed.
To my total lack of astonishment, the report argues that all EU space activity must take place under the auspicies of the ESA, and it was wrong to do otherwise.
It's as if Spaceship One failed, and NASA - who's very existance is essentially threatened by private space travel - was asked to produce the report on the failure.
This report is questionable purely due to the conflict of interest on the part of the ESA.
--
Toby
Re:Blackwash (Score:2)
The politics of this bug me slightly less than the total lack of real insight. It sounds like the report can be summarized as, "The mission failed because we didn't spend enough money on it." Only a government entity could truly believe that money is the solution to a problem. I would be much
Re:Blackwash (Score:2)
I would not say that Beagle2 management was incompent, just did not have time or money soon enough to do things as they should have been done or how they would have wanted to do them.
Standard Boilerplate Recommendation #1 (Score:4, Funny)
only 1/3rd Mars missions succeed (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope they try again. ESA Huygens was sucessful. And there are some lunar probes on the way.
Re:Spaceward Ho (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Spaceward Ho (Score:1, Funny)
But no, apparently it's some 'cushy' scientist funded by the government. Unlike NASA, a vast operation funded by the government. Our lot had to spend half their time looking for funding!
Anyway, what did we learn from any of this?
Mars: deserted wasteland.
Titan: deserted wasteland.
Moon: deserted wasteland.
Venus: deserted wasteland.
What, beyond simple curiousity, is the benefit of any of it?
Re:Spaceward Ho (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Spaceward Ho (Score:5, Interesting)
No, we can not all agree on this. Dont presume that you can speak for everyone, especially on topics where you (probably) are not qualified to make such statements.
While I respect your right to have your opinion, I think maybe you are talking out of your ass when you try to pretend that you know why NASA succedded and the Brits failed.
In 2000, Reuters said this:
If you want to criticize a failure, that is fine (although I dont think you are qualified to), analysis of errors can help to ensure they dont happen again. But your blind 'america is best - britain sucks' criticism is neither helpful nor true.
Does your Darwin snipe to mean that you do not believe in the theory of evolution by natural selection? I wouldnt be surprised if you don't.
Parent
Re:Spaceward Ho (Score:3, Insightful)
Using the Beagle failure (the reasons for which are still unknown) to bash European and British people, politics and science seems a bit xenophobic to me. The recent success of the Huygens lander
Re:Spaceward Ho (Score:2)
Re:Spaceward Ho (Score:2)
Re:And the #1 reason this project failed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hold on, Tex. How is "less funding" a socialistic thing? I thought most socialistic governments tend to OVERspend tax money, not the other way around.
It appears to me that they essentially made the same mistake that NASA did in the late 90's: try the cheap route.
Actually, the cheap route may not be so bad because some of the cheaper probe
Re:bureaucracy in, garbage out (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you have pin-point landing technology, you cannot really avoid operating near the vacinity of craters on Mars, because they are almost everywhere. But compared to all the other possible risks, landing on the wall of a large crater is fairly remote, probably something like 1/200.
Viking 1 was selected to land in one of the most crater-free parts of Mars. Images revealed a giant boulder about 20 feet from the lander. If it had landed on that boulder, it would have been toast. A large pointy rock can pop airbags also.
Parent
Re:bureaucracy in, garbage out (Score:2)
Re:europe and space (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you kidding? We're still sending people into space with less computing power on board than TI-83's. Well, we were. Today we don't send anyone into space because our so-called "advanced technology" is old n' busted. EU's got the new hotness, and we got the old n' busted. I would like to see China and the EU do more in space, so we feel more compelled to one-up them and do even greater things in space than we have yet done. As an added side benefit to all, international space races have been and will continue to be of benefit to all humanity.
Parent