'Beagle 3' looks to American ride

[ToSeek]

'Beagle 3' looks to American ride (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3926253.stm)


Professor Pillinger says he wants to send a second Beagle instrument package to the Red Planet as soon as possible.

"We wrote to Nasa last week, asking them if they'd like to put a Beagle pod on MSL and drop it off in an interesting place," he said.

[BigJim]

Not a bad idea. Although a more interesting idea that I'd heard (after thinking of it myself :wink: ) was to send multiple Beagles in 2007.

[Master258]

cool

[Cugel]

Wouldn't it be wiser to simply integrate the Beagle-3 experiments into the MSL rover? If you do it that way Pillinger's experiments will be carried around Mars for over 2 years, instead of being dropped to a static position.
It also cuts another Entry, Descent and Landing system (heatshield!) from the total package. In short: I think it's a strange idea to piggyback a lander on a rover.

[kucharek]

Does he really thinks, that after how he dealt with NASA before and how much Beagle 2's mishap fell back on Mars Express, that NASA would give him a ride?

Harald

[Irishman]

Cugel, I was thinking the same thing. Why remake Beagle when the imporant parts (science instruments) could be integrated to a rover? And in fact, I thought I'd read recently that some of those types of packages are in work for MSL.

[Tranquility]

Well a static lander may be more viable if it is dropped in an "interesting" albeit rocky place such as Cydonia. A rover would probably fall to pieces there.

[CuttleFishOfDoom]

Does he really thinks, that after how he dealt with NASA before and how much Beagle 2's mishap fell back on Mars Express, that NASA would give him a ride?

Harald

IMHO, that might be a smidgen uncharitable of you :). It was mighty unfortunate that Mars Express got partially lost underneath Beagle 2. I guess when you have a budget of pretty much nothing, PR is the only weapon you have for funding and support - and if nothing else, he was good at getting publicity for his work.

The more people are enthusiastic and interested in space exploration and the science around it, the better. NASA could learn a few things from him, frankly, about making space exploration a tad less tedious (from the public's perspective). They don't have to make it interesting to people like us, we already are interested -- it's the support and enthusiasm of the general public that is required and they find space travel about as interesting as watching paint dry (quite how faked moon landing theories can be more exciting than the real thing is beyond me).

If Colin has achieved nothing else, he's shown that you can raise the general public's interest and support in this stuff and do it without a bajillion dollars sitting in your account. He was unlucky that it failed.

Space exploration is full of "little mishaps". The polar lander's team failed to get the differnce between metric and imperial right, and the Russians (and Americans) have lost many other vehicles on the way to Mars through one mishap or another. None of those failures mean we should stop trying. Perhaps it is a British thing, but when anyone else loses a ship we all go "well, this should give us the momentum and knowledge to get it right next time", when we lose something there is nothing the British press like more than a right-royal failure. Which is a shame. Because you don't achieve anything unless you keep trying.

I'm of the opinion that the more the merrier. I'd rather have 20 Beagles dropped on different places on Mars than one rover -- probability of success is more in your favour :) And the science it could have done would have made it worth it. If there is an opportunity to send a Beagle 3, I'd support that -- it means that if the main lander fails, we still have a science return opportunity from a second lander. And if they both make it, we're all laughing.

I would hope that Colin and his team have had more than enough opportunities to learn how they could be more successful on a future mission, and to be fair to them, they were working under conditions that were most unfavourable (knock a few KG off there, knock a few hundred K of your budget there, that sort of thing...). No matter how you cut it, I believe it was amazing that they were able to put such an amazing package together with their volume and weight restrictions, the time they had to do it and the budget they had.

I'd like to see Beagle 3 go to Mars. The more we land there, the more varied the science we perform, the quicker we'll get more support to the tantilizing clues we're already sitting on thanks to the amazing results from the Mars Express orbiter, Spirit and Opportunity.

Go Beagle! ;-)

Toby

[lyford]

Hitchhiking?!?! WOuld you pick this guy up if you saw him on the side of the road?

http://81.86.117.130/images/misc/colin_pillinger.jpg

MUWUAHAHAHAH!

Seriously, I thought we had gone through this "better/faster/cheaper (choose 2)" thing before.

Though I think someday the microbot swarm network idea will come to fruition, Beagle was always a LONG shot - you can't fool mother nature - or in the words of another good doctor:

"For a successful technology,reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. "
Dr. Richard Feynman - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle

peace, out
lyford (edited for typos)

[ToSeek]

Seriously, I thought we had gone through this "better/faster/cheaper (choose 2)" thing before.

I maintain that BFC is fine so long as you go with the philosophy that whenever you send five missions you're going to lose one. The problem is that "failure is not an option", neither for NASA nor for public confidence in NASA.

[lyford]

Seriously, I thought we had gone through this "better/faster/cheaper (choose 2)" thing before.

I maintain that BFC is fine so long as you go with the philosophy that whenever you send five missions you're going to lose one. The problem is that "failure is not an option", neither for NASA nor for public confidence in NASA.

I agree with you on this, but there's a limit to how cheap you can go before it just becomes bad idea playhouse.

It's still roulette out there with so many uncontrollable variables, even with immense planning and resources failiure is often still an option. Look at Nozomi which kinda maybe woulda shoulda made it if that solar flare hadn't hit it. Enough can go wrong by fate alone without trying to skimp our way through the cosmos on the cheap.

I actually think the MER missions are a "bargain" - for the cost of B-2, each rover is on the planet tooling around and returning good science.
We can certainly afford to do this more often! Well, launch windows allowing....

This fellow has some interesting points Beagle:A Fortunate Failure (http://www.spacedaily.com/news/beagle2-04a.html), albeit a little harsh at times.

We are going to lose probes; that's the nature of the enterprise. More flights means more losses, but if designed well, more successes, too. Nevertheless, to be a little harsh myself, let's not just throw stuff at Mars and see what sticks.

[ToSeek]

Seriously, I thought we had gone through this "better/faster/cheaper (choose 2)" thing before.

I maintain that BFC is fine so long as you go with the philosophy that whenever you send five missions you're going to lose one. The problem is that "failure is not an option", neither for NASA nor for public confidence in NASA.

I agree with you on this, but there's a limit to how cheap you can go before it just becomes bad idea playhouse.


Well, yes. It's obvious now that trying to do Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander for less than the price of Mars Pathfinder (already a BFC mission) was a poor idea.

The current rovers are about half again as expensive - each - as Pathfinder, but it's clear we're getting our money's worth from them.

I do blame Dan Goldin for chanting "Better, Faster, Cheaper" like a mantra without ever really trying to define it (so far as I recall).

[Irishman]

Well a static lander may be more viable if it is dropped in an "interesting" albeit rocky place such as Cydonia. A rover would probably fall to pieces there.

I disagree. Whether you send a rover or a static lander, you first have to get it to the surface. Any technique to get a static lander to the surface can get a rover to the surface. Look at the success of the MERs using similar approach as Beagle 2. Once you're on the surface, both types of lander can check the immediate vicinity without moving. So there is no advantage to a static lander. But a rover can move around. Even if the terrain is so bad the rover bites it on the first "step", you still got what you would have from the static lander.

The advantage would be if you can make static landers cheaper or smaller with the same science package, and then seed more of them in various locations. Then you trade local mobility for large scale dispersion. That is a good trade off to evaluate. But if the costs are close (and I think they will be because the science package material is similar and the launch and delivery are similar and the reentry/landing are similar, leaving only the size and the mobility aspects as the main deltas), then you don't get enough savings on static landers to afford more of them for the same cost. Ergo, rovers.

The MERs are a bit of both - two rovers for dispersion and local mobility.

Plus, if you know your landing site is very rocky, you design a rover to handle it. The MERs are larger than Pathfinder, making them more capable. They've done a pretty good job with the terrain they encountered - craters and rocky plains and now the hills. I think they have more capability with the same design philosophy that can be achieved through experience and modification for future. Alternate ideas also exist, such as big balloon tires.

[lyford]

Alternate ideas also exist, such as big balloon tires.

Yes! Me likey! If you're gonna piggy back a mission on a lander, let it be the Tumbleweed rover. (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2004/78.cfm)

Land safely, finish primary mission, blow it up and let it go! Better yet, you could even have several that let loose BEFORE landing - it makes it's own gravy - I mean, it is it's own airbag.....
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/technology/tumbleweed-browse.jpg
I say it's time we put that MIRV (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRV) technology to good scientific use - multiple Tumbleweeds bouncing around Melas.

Though fans of the old TV show "The Prisoner" might have nightmares about this - the balloon device in the show was named Rover - go figure!
http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/bordereastchester/rover2.jpg

(I would have directly linked to the Tumbleweeds site, but for some reason robotics.jpl.nasa.gov is not responding right now.)

Edited for typos. That's a given.

[CuttleFishOfDoom]

Seriously, I thought we had gone through this "better/faster/cheaper (choose 2)" thing before.

Yes, but I think they got it the wrong way around. Rather than sending individual ships out there that are cheaper, surely the answer is to send more per-ship to minimise loss. We're relatively good at getting things to Mars (with the occasional mistake) these days, and we all know that the entry-and-landing phase is the most risky. Without real-time communications, no amount of clever programming is going to deal with every eventuality.

If you can make lots of Beagle style landers, or mini-vehicle landers, then you can drop a whole bunch from one orbiter. This way, a nice large ship can act as a hive for 4-20 of these things and they can be dropped out all over the shooting match. With the acceptance that 1 in 4 of them will fail, you'd still get a whole bundle of little rovers/landers on the ground and they could uplink through the orbiter that dispatched them meaning we wouldn't need all that high-gain antenna/storage/whatever because that could be on the orbiter.

This strikes me as a far superior BFC solution. And for added security, send two orbiters each with a payload of landers. The landers can almost be mass-produced under those circumstances, and evolved over several generations, again reducing cost further. The orbiters end up being your local Mars-global orbiting network.



"For a successful technology,reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. "
Dr. Richard Feynman - Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle


:-) Indeed, nature cannot be fooled. But nature doesn't do things in ones. It distributes the risk amongst many, a fact that seems to have escaped us many times :)

Toby

[Tranquility]

The advantage would be if you can make static landers cheaper or smaller with the same science package, and then seed more of them in various locations. Then you trade local mobility for large scale dispersion. That is a good trade off to evaluate. But if the costs are close (and I think they will be because the science package material is similar and the launch and delivery are similar and the reentry/landing are similar, leaving only the size and the mobility aspects as the main deltas), then you don't get enough savings on static landers to afford more of them for the same cost. Ergo, rovers.

Again, extra costs factor in. Building a rover capable of handling the rocky surroundings of Cydonia WOULD cost more than a lander. I'm fine with the idea if there is a negligible cost difference, otherwise it would be impractical to build a rover that "bites the dust" from go, not to mention wasteful. Spirit and Opportunity have the advantages of open spaces, a rover in Cydonia would be under a big difficulty trying to get around. Being able to build a reasonably cheap rover that CAN handle the rocky surroundings would be a great achievement, and no doubt I'd love to see rovers in Cydonia, but only if it's practical.

[Irishman]

Yes, but I think they got it the wrong way around. Rather than sending individual ships out there that are cheaper, surely the answer is to send more per-ship to minimise loss. We're relatively good at getting things to Mars (with the occasional mistake) these days, and we all know that the entry-and-landing phase is the most risky. Without real-time communications, no amount of clever programming is going to deal with every eventuality.

One mission (Mars Climate Orbiter?) was lost because of the metric/English conversion mistake. The orbiter entered too low in the atmosphere on the braking maneuver. That wouldn't have mattered how many objects, unless you space them out after launch on the way - a dubious plan. Mars Polar Lander is suspected to have been lost because of a design problem where the deployment of the landing struts overshot and triggered the engine shutdown limit switches for touchdown. Multiple landers with the same design flaw would have just meant more piles of junk on the surface. (Hardware problems more difficult to solve by remote than software.)

Beagle 2 is thought to have failed because the atmosphere was thinner than anticipated. Having several Beagles on staggered deploy might have allowed readjustment after the first. Spirit had that problem (though not catastrophic), and an adjustment was made to Opportunity's landing profile because of it. But clustering small deployables doesn't necessarily get you past the failure problem.

Tranquility, those are engineering and project tradeoffs, and I admit there's plenty of room for negotiation. And I will agree that getting a static lander to Cydonia beats getting nothing to Cydonia. ;)

[johnwitts]

Fly a static lander to Cydonia, but give it some wheels. That way it can move around. :-?

Seriously, Spirit and Opportunity seem to have had little trouble getting around. If they work OK, why not just keep sending MER type rovers to more and more adventurous sites? We've got the designs, just build some more. Plus, by MER 9&10 we should have a pretty good idea of how to tweak stuff for even better results. It's got to be better than starting over each time we do a mission.

[ToSeek]

Seriously, Spirit and Opportunity seem to have had little trouble getting around. If they work OK, why not just keep sending MER type rovers to more and more adventurous sites? We've got the designs, just build some more. Plus, by MER 9&10 we should have a pretty good idea of how to tweak stuff for even better results. It's got to be better than starting over each time we do a mission.

The Spirit and Opportunity landing sites were very carefully chosen to be as safe as possible. In fact, one of the biggest problems they had with landing site selection was not winnowing the choices but coming up with enough sites that were both suitable and of scientific interest to be able to make a choice (this from the seminar I attended at the Smithsonian a couple of months ago).

[johnwitts]

Seriously, Spirit and Opportunity seem to have had little trouble getting around. If they work OK, why not just keep sending MER type rovers to more and more adventurous sites? We've got the designs, just build some more. Plus, by MER 9&10 we should have a pretty good idea of how to tweak stuff for even better results. It's got to be better than starting over each time we do a mission.

The Spirit and Opportunity landing sites were very carefully chosen to be as safe as possible. In fact, one of the biggest problems they had with landing site selection was not winnowing the choices but coming up with enough sites that were both suitable and of scientific interest to be able to make a choice (this from the seminar I attended at the Smithsonian a couple of months ago).

Agreed. I saw some of this debate on 'Bouncing to Mars' on NASA TV. But surely the landing sites were chosen to be as conservative as possible. As more MERs are sent, their performance can be defined, refined and uprated as more is known.

Look at Apollo. First landing, find the biggest flattest area you can find to land. Last landing, land exactly where you want to in a big valley surrounded on all sides by monster mountains. Surely on Mars we'd get better and better at putting the stuff where we want, gently and consistently, especially with a sytem that has been proven over and over? Or use the same Rovers but use a different more accurate landing system.

I can see the headline now, MER 10, named John, landed today on Mars right next to the 'Face'. :)

[Cugel]

I was also wondering, why not repeat such a great success?
Why not send 2 more rovers in 2007? Or even 1 in 2005?
The problem is that these missions are very much defined by unique 'boundary values'. In this case the quality of the 2004 Mars opposition (extremely close to Earth) and the Delta-2 booster. In 2005 and 2007 you simply cannot send MER class rovers to Mars on a Delta-2. You need a bigger booster (delta-4) which costs $300M instead of $65M. The fact is that Mars missions are non-repeatable events, every one of them is unique in the amount of stuff you can throw to Mars.

By the way, the 2009 MSL lander is supposed to be a lot smarter in it's landing capabilities. I have a bet that it will land in Hellas Basin, which is far more interesting than Sydonia if you ask me.

[lyford]

The fact is that Mars missions are non-repeatable events, every one of them is unique in the amount of stuff you can throw to Mars.

Yes, IIRC they were also constraints placed upon locations by the solar panels, for example a polar mission wouldn't be possible with the same rover design.

So you might want to change the power source to RTG.

The Athena package is pretty awesome, but its tightly focused on a single purpose; to look for geologic signs of water, and most likely we want to expand that mission on future flights. So we change the instruments to allow for testing of organic chemistry, etc.

Oh, and while we're at it, if we add larger diameter wheels so we can go to more areas, and a larger body so insulation is more effective. And revamp the landing system so we can touch down where we want in more interesting zones.

Okay, MER-C is ready for flight! Except now you have designed a totally new rover.

Maybe we can use the NASA decals over again, unless Sean decides to bring back the worm logo!

Looks like until sensors get small and cheap enough that you can print out 25 for the same weight and cost of one now, the mass produced explorabot swarm won't happen. Standardization is usally a GOOD THING, like the Mariner system bus back in the day, but the missions are much more complex now.