Beagle 2 Official Inquiry Released 113
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."
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."
Re:Buggered Beagle (Score:0, Informative)
And what about NASA's Genesis mission? The chutes on that one failed to open too, just like on Beagle 2. And guess what? Genesis and Beagle 2 used the same faulty American made chute mechanism! Guess you ought think before you make a clueless remark.
Re:Spaceward Ho (Score:4, Informative)
Freedom of Information Act request by NewScientist (Score:5, Informative)
The article can be read here [newscientist.com]
Re:Groups of three (Score:3, Informative)
-Air-bag design not robust and the testing programme not sufficient;
-Risk of collision between the back cover and the main parachute;
-Re-bounding (up to 28mtr) of the air-bag/lander into the main parachute;
-Untimely release of the lander from the air-bag.
All four involve some luck but could also have been a major design error.
Doubling up the number of landers only helps against failures due to 'statistical bad luck'. If it was a design error (e.g. parachute to small, fatal error in software) nothing would have helped and you would have three craters instead of one. In case of the Mars Exploration Rovers the doubling worked out beautifully: they now have a double chance on getting good science. Similar for the Voyager probes. It is not always beneficial however: sending two orbiters a la Mars Global Surveyor would have lowered the mission risk, but it wouldn't have doubled the science in case of double success (each orbiter sees the whole planet).
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]
Of course! (Score:1, Informative)
Yes. They haven't done anything useful. We should use the Beagle as a perfect example of what to do...
"why not try sending something useful next time like a spectrometer or some other sampling tool?"
Maybe if you get off your mental duff and just look:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/current/marsex
http://athena.cornell.edu/
You might find that it does these things. Don't try to tear down the widely successful ROVER missions to mars by being ignornant of facts.
Also, to help you, there are several missions to Mars from NASA that are doing so much research right now:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/index.cfm
is a list....
Here's just a few Mars specific probes going on right now:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/current/ma
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/
And while NASA isn't doing as great a job as it could, it is doing *something*.
Now go back to your crawl space before I get medieval on your *ss.