I saw the artist’s conception (animation) of how Spirit was to land on Mars. The airbags, parachute, and retro rockets were pretty interesting as was the depiction of the airbag encased lander bouncing across the surface of Mars.
I didn’t see any stories on the technology used to try to land Europe’s Beagle. Did anyone else get some details on how the Beagle landing was to occur? Was the same airbag, parachute, rocket design used?
check this out.
This is the website of EADS Astrium, contractor company for beagle 2. It has movies/animation on beagle’s landing
^ Thanks.
It looks like the same technique for landing was used. One scientific group caught a break and one didn't, I guess.
Yep. With these delicate landing missions, after all the careful planning, calcs and testing, it still comes down to hoping for everything going right.
Unfortunately they’re still hoping for a signal from beagle 2.
Here’s an interesting article on some of the difs and similarities between the Beagle and the Spirit BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mixed fortunes on Mars
After two days of silence, NASA controllers were surprised to get carefully engineered random “filler” data at 128 kbps. The debug info says that Spirit has tried to reboot at least 60 times since Wednesday. Now, some wild theories:
NASA’s trying to hide illegal mp3s on Mars!
rover: 128kbps
most mp3’s: 128kbps
COINCIDENCE?
i think not.
I for one, welcome our…
…European, constantly rebooting, battery draining overlords. Now we know Beagle 2 was not lost but was in transit to Gusev crater. It took a little time to silently creep up behind spirit. If we had a high-enough resolution camera we would see that damn dog continuously poking at the rover, pressing our reset button.
Cheers to the European engineers who caught us with our pants downs and jeers to the American engineers who thought our little rover needed an external reset button for some reason.