This commentary has some interesting observations about the failures of NASA’s Mars missions.
It points out that during the 60’s and 70’s 8 of 8 Mars missions were successfull (excepting two others whose launch vehicles failed).
The explanation that I like best of Beagle’s silence is that The Martians have gotten wise to us, and don’t want earthlings spying on them anymore.
Would that include cold-soaking it at near absolute zero temperatures for six months, bombarding it with blasts of cosmic radiation, hitting the atmosphere of a planet millions of miles away, landing on unknown terrain, and then righting itself and deploying an antenna?
The problem with Mars lander missions is that there are so many unknowns that you can’t control. The thing could simply have rolled into a fissure or wound up under a rock outcropping or something, and it’s done. There are only so many things you can prepare for, and for the rest you cross your fingers and hope.
Like the old quote about the dancing bear - the amzing thing isn’t how well the bear dances, but that it can dance at all.
Apparently Jodrell Bank has just received a signal from Beagle, which goes as follows:
Scientists are mystified.
Ale: I am deeply offended by your comment.
I have never ruined a mission!
From the simulations they’ve shown, any number of things could have gone wrong. From landing on a rock, or in the shadow of a rock, or in a ditch. That is if it even made it through the searing heat of the atmosphere. Keep in mind that the space shuttle, something that we’ve used repeatedly, still succumbed to the atmosphere of Earth.
Frankly, I’m more surprised 1/3 of the missions succeeded than that 2/3 of them failed.
I don´t have proves yet… but I´ll be watching you.
Did I say “proves”?
Assumes intimidating pose
No I didn´t, I said “proofs”
I suppose next you’ll be blaming me as the glitch in your post. 
I’ll accept that launching probes to Mars is very complex. However, there is one thing that bothers me. We successfully sent two Viking probes to land on Mars in the 1970’s. Why don’t we just send more probes with the exact same designs (with a few improvements such as software upgrades etc.). We know that design works.
You know, there’s another possibility. Perhaps the Martians are destroying our probes before they land so as to avoid being discovered. They let probes that are headed for areas with no trace of Martian civilization land, such as Viking, the Mars Rover etc., but sabatage the ones that are landing near cities, highways, and other areas that show signs of habitation. As soon as that giant carving of Elvis’s face was discovered they had to work quickly re-carving it to look just like a natural rock formation before our scientists could have time to get a more enhanced photograph!
Two words: Faster, Better, Cheaper.
Yup
They shot the beagle down , with a 1920’s style death ray
PM Blair is meeting in cabinet , to discuss launching a Starstrike on the suspected martian terrorists, RAF to lead the way.
:)this is what happens when you post at 3 in the morning
Declan
If you really wanted to screw with the Earthlings, you’d dress someone like this and have them run past the camera in a similar manner: Martian
I’d sell my soul to be able to pull a prank like that off!
Here are some of the reasons:
[ul]
[li]You can’t just pull out a 30-year old blueprint and use it. The components are no longer available, and there’s no guarantee that modern equivalents work exactly the same way. Unless the design and manufacturing process is kept alive by continuous improvements, the design dies.[/li][li]We don’t want an exact replica of the Viking lander, we want better ones with different capabilities. The Viking lander is not designed to carry a rover, for example.[/li][li]The Viking lander was huge, about 600kg mass for the lander alone. It takes a very large, expensive launcher to send something like that to Mars. In comparison, the Mars Pathfinder lander was about 360 kg, and the Beagle II was about 60 kg.[/li][li]The exchange of information between different teams isn’t as smooth as you might imagine. Most components are built by private sub-contractors, and fabrication techniques aren’t public information. (NASA engineers only need to know who makes good components, not how.) And recently the US government has been extremely paranoid about space technology leaking out, even to friendly countries. [/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li] Quite visible in the photos from Viking is a rather large boulder, capable of obliterating the probe on impact, that it missed during descent through sheer dumb luck. Hence the alternate “balloon” landing mechanism used on Pathfinder and MER[/li][/ul]
Well, that’s the problem, then. It’s all sticky.
Ah yes, Bob Parks, the man seems to have a fetish about blasting NASA and manned space programs in general.
The high failure rate for unmanned missions shows nothing of the kind. First of all, most folks don’t even understand what NASA does. (Not even Mr. Parks, apparently.) IIRC, the bulk of NASA’s money does not go to the manned space program. IAC, NASA spends a good chunk of money on such things like improving aircraft design and helping with various military projects like the Predator RPVs (or UMAV’s or whatever hell damned acronym the military’s using for them). Most people think NASA launches shuttles. (Wonder why people pay more attention to a manned program when there’s only a couple of launches a year at best? Maybe it’s because there’s people on them who say things like, “Look at the view!” and not some mindless robot that’s only going to send back pictures and make “beep beep” noises.) As for the cost of manned missions, well, that’s a bit of a “chicken and the egg” problem. One benefit of having people on a mission is that if something does go wrong, you’ve got people on site to try and fix the problem. Admittedly it could be an Apollo 13 problem, where they’re just trying to survive and make it home, but every Apollo mission that landed on the Moon had some kind of glitch that had to be worked through by the astronauts. Had those been unmanned missions, many of the experiments would have simply had to have been abandoned.
As for his second point about an unmanned mission to another planet accomplishing more than a shuttle mission, well, duh. It’s apples and oranges here, folks. The shuttle goes to Earth orbit, all they have to play with there is what they bring with them. An unmanned mission to the Moon or Mars is exploring another planet! Last time I checked, planets were huge, shuttles not so huge. A random sample and grab mission to anything off-Earth, done by human or robot is going to yeild more information than almost anything we could do in Earth orbit. Comparing the shuttle missions to planetary missions is like comparing trying to find out about the world from inside my house (without looking out the windows, using the TV, internet or phone) and Magellan’s voyage around the world.