Beagle 3? - Whats your view?

GraemeSkinner · 2004-05-06 01:30:46

As for the future, the Beagle 2 team is already considering what might be possible with a Beagle 3 mission. "Viking did a very noble job," said Pillinger. "They had three experiments, which were configured to see whether there were any actively metabolizing organisms on the planet. [Beagle 2] was not doing a metabolism experiment. The thing which is crucial as far as I'm concerned is we need to see whether we can detect any organic [biologically produced] matter.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/beagle2-04d.html]Article

I'm all for Beagle 3, the basic design is already in place from Beagle 2, if they can account for what went wrong and overcome those problems I can't see why B3 should not be sent as soon as possible - the more thats up there scouting around means more data to look at back on Earth.

Graeme

Mark Friedenbach · 2004-05-06 02:18:12

Gah, good riddance.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/beagle2-04a.html]Read Me

Palomar · 2004-05-06 05:57:32

As for the future, the Beagle 2 team is already considering what might be possible with a Beagle 3 mission. "Viking did a very noble job," said Pillinger. "They had three experiments, which were configured to see whether there were any actively metabolizing organisms on the planet. [Beagle 2] was not doing a metabolism experiment. The thing which is crucial as far as I'm concerned is we need to see whether we can detect any organic [biologically produced] matter.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/beagle2-04d.html]Article
I'm all for Beagle 3, the basic design is already in place from Beagle 2, if they can account for what went wrong and overcome those problems I can't see why B3 should not be sent as soon as possible - the more thats up there scouting around means more data to look at back on Earth.
Graeme

*I hope you all go for it. I did read months ago, however, that there may be funding issues with getting subsequent Beagles to Mars? One of the ESA staffer expressed his/her hope that NASA would, in one of our subsequent missions to Mars, allow the next Beagle to accompany our probe (for a fee, of course). I'm all for that.

Mark, sorry -- I don't understand Dr. Bell's attitude. That article has been posted previously. I can't be happy for lost science. Beagle 2 is science lost. I was sorry to see its fate. We've had such good luck with Spirit & Opportunity; Bell's attitude strikes me as some sort of weird sour grapes, a very odd heckling at failure. At the very least, his opinions (which, yeah, he's entitled to) seems unprofessional and unworthy of a scientist, IMO.

--Cindy

Mark Friedenbach · 2004-05-06 15:08:22

Mark, sorry -- I don't understand Dr. Bell's attitude. That article has been posted previously. I can't be happy for lost science. Beagle 2 is science lost. I was sorry to see its fate. We've had such good luck with Spirit & Opportunity; Bell's attitude strikes me as some sort of weird sour grapes, a very odd heckling at failure. At the very least, his opinions (which, yeah, he's entitled to) seems unprofessional and unworthy of a scientist, IMO.

Beagle2 was doomed to fail from the beginning. It was underfunded, rushed, and not properly tested. Even members of the Beagle2 team gave it only a 50/50 chance of success (that was before it landed!). Imagine what odds an outside investigator might have given it. Even if it had landed, what would it have found out? Nothing. You won't find life on Mars by taking surface samples from open, radiation soaked plains and craters. We tried that with viking. If there is life on Mars, it's deep underground, or in hard to reach places that the beagle2 probe couldn't have gotten to. There wasn't any science lost.

What was lost was the potential for science. Beagle2 cost 60-80 million euros! Can you imagine how that money could have been spent? Perhaps on some mission that actually had a chance of success. We have not been "lucky" with Spirit and Opportunity, other than opportunity's hole-in-one landing. The MER rovers have been a success because we did everything in our power to make them a success, and gave the project a proper budget to achieve our goals. You can't do Mars science on a shoestring. It just a waste of money.

I hope Pillanger does not get his way. He clearly has no idea how to manage a space probe project, or estimate the costs involved in designing and testing such complex hardware. This is not an attack on our British friends, or the ESA, but on the stupid "faster, better, cheaper" philosophy the beagle2 was designed under. You can choose one of them, maybe two. But you can't have all three. Remember all those probes we lost in the 90's when Dan Goldin was around?

I hope the 100 million euros, or whatever Pillinger claims it will cost to build the beagle3, will be spent on something else.

Palomar · 2004-05-06 15:31:26

*Hi Mark. You make some good points. Yes, S & O's success was more than "simple luck" (I didn't mean for it to sound otherwise, of course).

And yes, I agree with "You can't do Mars science on a shoestring. It just a waste of money."

Anyway, your post makes a whole lot more sense than Bell's silly article.

--Cindy

Mark Friedenbach · 2004-05-06 22:49:09

Hi Cindy. Yeah, I like Bell, he seems like a smart guy, but he can get pretty silly with his writing. I was totally put off as well by his editorial the first time I read it, I had to think about it a bit and look up some stuff on the beagle before I switched to his side.

The biggest problem with the beagle is credibility. Remember how hard it was for NASA to sell congress on MER after Mars Polar Lander and Mars Observer? I can bet the same arguments we heard are going on over in Britain today. I really hope our friends over there get involved with mars exploration, but there can only be so many setbacks before the government pulls the plug. Thanks to beagle2, even genuine space probes with feasable goals and a realistic budget are going to have a hard time finding funds because politicians just won't be able to tell the next MER from another beagle.

Stephen · 2004-05-07 03:03:21

Beagle2 was doomed to fail from the beginning. It was underfunded, rushed, and not properly tested.
[snip]
What was lost was the potential for science. Beagle2 cost 60-80 million euros! Can you imagine how that money could have been spent? Perhaps on some mission that actually had a chance of success. We have not been "lucky" with Spirit and Opportunity, other than opportunity's hole-in-one landing. The MER rovers have been a success because we did everything in our power to make them a success, and gave the project a proper budget to achieve our goals. You can't do Mars science on a shoestring. It just a waste of money.
I hope Pillanger does not get his way. He clearly has no idea how to manage a space probe project, or estimate the costs involved in designing and testing such complex hardware. This is not an attack on our British friends, or the ESA, but on the stupid "faster, better, cheaper" philosophy the beagle2 was designed under. You can choose one of them, maybe two. But you can't have all three. Remember all those probes we lost in the 90's when Dan Goldin was around?
I hope the 100 million euros, or whatever Pillinger claims it will cost to build the beagle3, will be spent on something else.

While I broadly agree with you about Pillinger and Beagle 2, let's have some perspective here. If we're going to blame Goldin for MCO and MPL shouldn't we also give him credit for the MERs as well? After all it was he who gave the go-ahead for them. In fact it was also him, IIRC, who found the money for *two* (when NASA might otherwise have only sent one; just as there will probably be only one MSL in 2009, thereby once again having NASA putting all its martian eggs in one geewhiz basket).

As for "all those probes we lost in the 90's"...well, perhaps somebody has a better memory than I do but while I remember 4 Mars probes being lost in the 1990s one of those was the billion-dollar Mars Observer whose loss provoked Goldin to try the "faster, better, cheaper" philosophy in the first place while a second was the Russian Mars 96 one.

Do we blame Goldin for them too?

That still leaves the MCO and the MPL, of course, but to claim they put the "faster, better, cheaper" philosophy in a bad light is a selective use of the evidence. The truth is just as America's innings on Mars probes is not as bad as everybody seems to think it is--it only LOOKs bad if you insist on counting all the Soviet/Russian losses too (Russia, and the Soviets before them, have had plain awful luck with Mars probes)--so the score on "faster, better, cheaper" only looks bad if you conveniently forget about such *other* "faster, better, cheaper" NASA missions as Lunar Prospector, Stardust, NEAR, Genesis, and MGS. (And I guess Mars Pathfinder comes under that heading too.)

In any case, as I understand the basis of the rationale of "faster, better cheaper": it was better to lose one or two small, cheap missions (whose loss can be made up by flying a replacement fairly quickly), than to lose a large and expensive one whose replacement may not be flown for a decade or more.

Basically it all comes down to a question of money. You're certainly right to point out the perils and pitfalls of rushing and underfunding of "faster, better, cheaper", but what alternative do you propose? If the politicians will not provide *all* the funding necessary to do a mission properly then those who decide whether to send such missions or not will have to make do with less; and making do with less means you either cut costs per mission or you cut missions. Cutting costs leads to blunders slipping past. Cutting missions means you don't go at all; or you find yourself in competition with other projects and their supporters, each out making a claim on the same limited pot of money.

So what do you do? If you had an opportunity to do a Mars mission and you know or guessed that to decide not to do it would mean no other opportunities to do one for maybe the next decade, like Pillinger, would you give up and abandon the mission just because the powers-that-be would not give you enough funding?

The tragedy of Beagle 2 is not that Pillinger made the effort he did but that the British government was too penny-pinching to give him the funding necessary to do it properly. That he did not have funding, however, is not an argument against making the attempt. From Pillinger's point of view it was probably a case of better to have tried and lost than never to have tried at all.

The same goes to MCO and MPL. Had they *not* failed NASA and Congress would still be trying to pinch pennies on Mars missions. Those two failures drove home the kind of lesson which, in turn, allowed the MERs to succeed.

Ian Flint · 2004-05-07 10:00:21

Beautiful Stephen!

It sounds like the "faster, better, cheaper" approach did exactly what it set out to do. It sent a bunch of 'small' missions: most made it, but some didn't.

I think congress and the public just couldn't handle losing anything. I mean 100 million and 500 million are still a lot of money to the average Joe. I think our collective mindset is that if we're going to invest millions and years into a project it sure as hell better work. "Faster, better, cheaper" just isn't compatible with us at this time.

Mark Friedenbach · 2004-05-07 14:13:43

In any case, as I understand the basis of the rationale of "faster, better cheaper": it was better to lose one or two small, cheap missions (whose loss can be made up by flying a replacement fairly quickly), than to lose a large and expensive one whose replacement may not be flown for a decade or more.
Basically it all comes down to a question of money. You're certainly right to point out the perils and pitfalls of rushing and underfunding of "faster, better, cheaper", but what alternative do you propose? If the politicians will not provide *all* the funding necessary to do a mission properly then those who decide whether to send such missions or not will have to make do with less; and making do with less means you either cut costs per mission or you cut missions. Cutting costs leads to blunders slipping past. Cutting missions means you don't go at all; or you find yourself in competition with other projects and their supporters, each out making a claim on the same limited pot of money.
So what do you do?

I'd rather cut missions than cut costs.

You are correct though that we should thank Goldin for opening up these smaller classes of space probes. That was a good decision, and did in fact make things "faster, better, cheaper" overall (faster turnaround time between probes, better science in total, cheaper per-mission costs). In this sense, "faster, better, cheaper" has done wonders for our robotic program.

The belief that this philosophy can be applied to individual missions is however misguided. You can have 'faster, better' but it won't be cheaper, or you can have 'faster, cheaper' but it won't be better. "better" (as in more science) and "cheaper" (as in smaller budget) are mutally exclusive. Unfortunately, Goldin did have this belief that JPL costs were uneccessarily inflated, and many of the first and second generation space probes done under f,b,c were rushed and underfunded.

EDIT: typo

Shaun Barrett · 2004-05-08 05:43:00

A very absorbing debate, Stephen, Mark, Cindy, et al.
And a very good reminder of the pros and cons of 'faster, better, cheaper'. (By the way, am I dreaming or did I read that as 'faster, smaller, cheaper' at some stage or other?)

Anyhow, Beagle 2 was a brave effort in my book and I'm very sorry it failed.

atomoid · 2004-05-08 23:27:58

I dont know why NASA's Mars program doesn't reuse the technologies that have been developed at such enormous cost. Sure its a good idea to always be developing new technologies for the general vector of progress and thats what NASA does very well, however, I imagine that they could resend a slightly revised MER platform each and every launch window, that way we'd be assured of some public-relations bolstering media coverage that only seems to come from surface missions. The next scheduled lander is the Pheonix 2007 which is based on the failed MPL platform and cant do any roving. The MSL in 2009 is a billion-dollar lander, all NASA's eggs are in one basket here using unproven and highly risky landing technology. Dont get me wrong i think if MSL works it will be money and risk well spent and will make the MERs look like toy missions. I just hope they will refine the design and send another the next launch window after that rather than just sit on it. I think we need lots of inexpensive rovers on Mars to examine lots of areas in a consistent schedule, not just one expensive rover constrained in a few hundred mile area for a few years. Redundancy and pervasiveness is key to Mars exploration and more rovers at a lower cost each seems the only way to do this within a tight budget to ensure the likelihood of success.

Since all the development costs have been already spent on the MER platform, and the technology has been proven and the operations debugged and refined in real-world use, I think they should spend the money concentrating on fitting new science packages into the existing platform (and also increase its roving speed a bit while theyre at it!). I guess we'd need a complete bean-counting to see if the savings really add up, but consider how many years were spent developing the Athena platform, now that we have it perfected lets get our money's worth out of it until the model is obsolete. With a fixed budget this means less money going to engineering new EDL and roving platforms themselves and more of it going to science being done on Mars surface. Im all for the Mars science.

Mark Friedenbach · 2004-05-09 01:47:02

NASA does reuse technologies. The MER rovers were designed on top of the knowledgebase Pathfinder gave us, and I can assure you that all the data learned from Spirit and Opportunity will be put to use in MSL. We're not throwing out the old, we're just building upon it to make it better.

As for why NASA doesn't send MER-clones at every launch opportunity, the answer I would guess is that most of the cost for a mission is in building, launching, and operations, not the design (which is the only thing we'd reuse), and that the rate of science return would quickly diminish (there are so many things that can be done with the MER design). Perhaps most importantly though, running continuous missions would tie up all the smart people currently working on S & O, who would otherwise be working on the next generation of space probe systems.

The Pheonix isn't a rover because it doesn't need to be. It's primary function is to drill into the surface and look for water. It doesn't need to be mobile to do this (rover capabilities would add weight--no need for them unless necessary). I understand the MSL has a complex "smart lander" to prove the technology. Pathfinder-esque landing bags can only take us so far (my understanding is that they don't scale very well). I do agree with you that NASA is putting all their eggs in one basket, but my limited understanding is that an airbag landing system would put too much stress on a rover the size of the MSL. I do wish they'd send two though, Voyager and MER have shown that though it costs 2x as much, you certainly get more than twice the science.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

RobS · 2004-05-09 08:58:48

I wish they'd send two MSLs as well, and that they send another rover on 2007 (I'm sure it's too late to plan one for 2005). I think the main limitation on the current design, including its speed, is the size of the solar panels. Spirit and Opportunity are operating on the equivalent power of just a few light bulbs. MSL will have nuclear power.

I suppose by the time we send people there, we will have robotic rover technology highly developed and we will be in the position to keep a dozen or so of them roving about under solar power for a few years. The surface crew could operate them to speed up their motion and maximize their science. One could have a team of two walking around an area while two other astronauts are exploring the same area via rover. One could even have an advanced rover providing mobile science for a surface exploration team, telling them what types of outcrops lie a few hundred meters away and performing advanced chemical analysis on samples on the spot. If you have Helios-type solar powered aircraft cruising the planet, the Helioses could snag and retrieve sample cannisters without landing to bring samples back to the outpost for analysis, dropping empty sample cannisters for the rovers to pick up and refill for later retrieval. A big Helios might even be used to drop rovers (with an airbag system) or possibly even pick up rovers from the surface and fly them back to the Outpost for repair (via a long spring-loaded cable).

But that's the mature technology, 25 years from now.

-- RobS

cassioli · 2004-05-09 12:08:18

http://beagle3d.free.fr/3d/be3dLandingA.php]Beagle 2 landing in VRML

Luca

SpaceNut · 2005-04-08 10:20:12

While Europe has lander goal for Mars it would not leave Earth until June 2011 and could arrive at the Red Planet in June 2013.
This time thou it would be a rover and would "sniff" the air for signs of biology and listen to the ground for evidence of Marsquakes.

How would they accomplish this goal of launch:

EUROPE'S MISSION TO MARS
To leave Kourou, French Guiana, spaceport in 2011
Will launch on Russian-built Soyuz-Fregat vehicle
Planetary positions account for long journey time
Landing date will avoid worst of duststorm season
US may be asked to provide orbital relay of data
Could also provide entry, descent and landing expertise
Would employ parachutes, airbags and retro-rockets

But what type of probe would it be:

The likely final mission will emerge and evolve from concepts that are already on the table and have been debated for some time.
One is ExoMars - a large rover that flies with a relay orbiter. An ExoMars-lite version would use orbiters already at Mars to send home its data.
And then there is BeagleNet, a twin rover design that delivers the next generation of instruments designed for Beagle 2.

Lots to read in the article and to enjoy in the BeagleNet image.

Stephen · 2005-04-11 19:32:23

While http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4423883.stm] Europe has lander goal for Mars it would not leave Earth until June 2011 and could arrive at the Red Planet in June 2013.

Why would it take two years to get to Mars? Are they planning to use ion propulsion?

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Re: Beagle 3? - Whats your view?

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