Wreckage Of Beagle 2 Found? Options

[imran]

Wreckage of Beagle found scattered in Mars crater

Talk about being unlucky assuming this is confirmed.

[ermar]

Unlucky? Seems pretty lucky for Pilinger if it checks out...

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/i..._pt2/index.html

That link seems to cover the Beagle landing area (albeit some time before the landing), but I'm not quite sure which crater is the suspect one or what the relevant pictures are...

(could be feature discussed in http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/08/31/)?

[lyford]

Dr. Pillinger, Dec, 2003

Professor Colin Pillinger, lead scientist on the Beagle 2 project, said this was the "absolutely worst case scenario". But he added: "We'd have to be incredibly unlucky that it went right down this crater."

Dr. Pillinger, Dec, 2005:

“It’s a bit like hitting the side of the pocket in snooker,” said Professor Colin Pillinger, of the Open University, who led the mission. “The plan was for it to bounce along a flat surface, but instead it seems to have hit the wall of the crater and that messed up the bounce sequence, damaging the lander. If this is all true we were very unlucky. A sideswipe like this was just what we didn’t want.”

I shan't be going to Vegas with the Good Doctor. (Though I hope he has been saving his good luck for his fight with MS)

[jamescanvin]

I didn't see one on the page linked by imram but the BBC has a picture.

I hope they have a 'before' shot, else I'm going to be more than a little skeptical.

James

[odave]

Yep, shades of the false ID of MPL's remains earlier this year. If anything, it gives MRO one place to look in the haystack of the ellipse.

[dilo]

I didn't see one on the page linked by imram but the BBC has a picture.

I hope they have a 'before' shot, else I'm going to be more than a little skeptical.

James

The BBC image show exactly the same feature linked in ermar post, but negative/contrast-enhanced version. Below I made a resume poster of identification...

If identification is correct, there is a commonality between Opportunity and Beagle: both landed inside craters of similar sizes...!
Howewer, looking to the high-res crater images, I'm very skeptical too. A promising elevated structure visible in original 1.5 m/pixel MOC view (lower inset) seems not visible in the cPROTO obtained in April 2004 (upper inset), obtained under similar illumination condition; the presumed "airbag" feature in the crater center doesn't convince me...

[deglr6328]

Ohh yes! If I squint hard enough I can just make it out and if you squint juuuust a bit harder you can make out some channel like forms which appear to be in the shape of canals that..... Seriously, I think this is silly, we're nearly looking at individual pixels here people, just above the noise floor and we're talking about a humungous haystack. They're two parallel lines, wouldn't sand dunes be a slightly more prosaic cause?

[djellison]

If identification is correct, there is a commonality between Opportunity and Beagle: both landed inside craters of similar sizes...!

Well - to be fair, Oppy didnt land in a crater, it rolled into one

I just saw CP on BBC Breakfast News, and he was fairly cautious that

Unless B2 broke up high in the atmosphere and burnt up, there should be SOMETHING on the ground. A new impact crater, or a parachute, or a parachute and some airbags etc etc depending on how far the whole thing got. Given how easily the MER chutes were spotted - SOMETHING should be visible, and this is as good a candidate as anything, so it gives a specific target for HIRISE, and given the HIRISE data flow, I'm going to be hooked on the data when it arrives

Doug

[djellison]

Just had a thought - if the impact into the side of the crater wall was enough to lunch the spacecraft, then how did the spacecraft trigger the pyros to jettison the three airbags? They couldnt be that far apart yet not seperated could they? WHo knows, hopefully MRO will tell us what's really in that little crater in 12 months time or so.

Doug

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Hmmmm...

So there was no error or malfunction of the lander.

But it seems that landing into hollowed places is not uncommon. Imagine it had landed a bit more to the right, in the larger crater... rolling all along the slope, to end up bogged into a dune in the bottom.


This is, I think, a lesson to retain: we cannot design landers able to land only into ideal flat places. The landers must be able to land into harsh places, including craters and slopes.

[djellison]

ORRrr....

Design them with the ability to navigate themselves to locally safe places to land during terminal descent.

Doug

[jamescanvin]

The BBC image show exactly the same feature linked in ermar post, but negative/contrast-enhanced version. Below I made a resume poster of identification...

Ah, yes, sorry didn't notice ermar's second link (it's been a long day)

Thanks for the poster, very useful.

Looks like a crater to me.. maybe with some kind of, err, abyss! It's hard to tell for sure.

James

[djellison]

I went and found the orig MSSS image, got the IMG, NASA-Viewed it, did a trick a read that Phil uses by essentially subtracting from the whole image a vertical average of every column of pixels ( to subtract some of the streaking - I duplicated the image, resized to one pixel high, resized to the full size, inverted and put at 50%...ish) - then enlarged by 50% with simply nearest neighbour interpolation to not infer anything that isnt there, and then did the same trick of Phil's again to get rid of a little more noise, and came up with this.

Doug

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[edstrick]

It's a good candidate for the remains. Better candidate than that smudge in the polar layered terrain they suspected was Polar Lander.

[djellison]

Data from http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/r16_r21/im...6/R1602082.html Courtesy NASA/JPL/MSSS - go play 'spot the chute' - I cant find it, then again, I couldnt find the Pathfinder one either.

The lables are my best guess from the description on the BBC News website

Doug

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