Touch down for Rover!!!

"When you walk outside today, if it is clear, you can see Mars. Just think, we just landed a rover on that planet. That is very sobering," JPL director Charles Elachi says.
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Very impressive. Incredible acheivement for their entire team.
 
some of the first images:
firstimage1.jpg

later,
epic
 
"The Martian Information Minister reports that there was absolutely no successful landing and that Martian air defenses have engaged and shot down their second UFO in just 10 days. He went on to say that their Defense Minister "Marvin" is working on a uber weapon known as the Illudium PEW-36 Explosive Space Modulator that will vanquish the infidels in a single Earth shattering KABOOM!"

(Blatantly copied from another post over at Slashdot then R3D)
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
ByteMe said:
Looks like it takes yankee know-how to do it!
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Well you lost a couple first - and they all cost a lot more. The UK could probably send a few more Beagles and still not spend a fraction of what NASA lost on the way to Mars.
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Each rover costs 5 times as much as Beagle 2.
 
nutball said:
Each rover costs 5 times as much as Beagle 2.
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That isn't surprising really considering the disparities in complexity and size. The Beagle 2 is no doubt an ingenious device but I think it pales in comparison to the Rover.

beagle2model.jpg


merpathfinder.jpg
 
Sabastian said:
nutball said:
Each rover costs 5 times as much as Beagle 2.
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That isn't surprising really considering the disparities in complexity and size. The Beagle 2 is no doubt an ingenious device but I think it pales in comparison to the Rover.
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Size for size, Beagle does a lot more science. IMO, Rover has traded off the science (and weight) in order to gain manoeuvebility. From the science point of view this might be questionable, but it does have a bigger "wow" factor, which I can see being important in today's political climate where NASA has to watch out for it's budget allocation.

I still hold a small hope that Beagle might respond when it's proper orbiter arrives in the next few days, but it's looking more bleak all the time :( . It's good that at least one of the teams managed to get a functioning probe working on the surface of Mars, as every success is one more step down the road towards getting us into space as a species.
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
Size for size, Beagle does a lot more science. IMO, Rover has traded off the science (and weight) in order to gain manoeuvebility. From the science point of view this might be questionable, but it does have a bigger "wow" factor, which I can see being important in today's political climate where NASA has to watch out for it's budget allocation.

I still hold a small hope that Beagle might respond when it's proper orbiter arrives in the next few days, but it's looking more bleak all the time :( . It's good that at least one of the teams managed to get a functioning probe working on the surface of Mars, as every success is one more step down the road towards getting us into space as a species.
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Don't get me wrong here it would have been nice to have the beagle 2 work out. I do not really care who has success, only that there is success. Certainly a failure on this mission from NASA would have caused financial stress politically, but that amounts to an expensive gamble that appears to have paid off in spades so far. I am not sure if the Beagle 2 is more capable in any way but surely would have produced a great bang for the buck. The flexibility in terms of exploration that the rover offers though is a great thing. Possibly a pre cursor to larger and even more sophisticated machinery being delivered to the Martian surface. There is no doubt that the rover is clearly a better exploratory solution simply based on the fact that it is very mobile and capable of taking samples from a wider variety of geology. I wouldn't pretend to know the differences between their ability to analyze samples though and it may very well be that the Beagle 2 has more sophisticated analyses of the samples it takes. As it is NASA, on this mission, has succeeded extremely well it appears. Hopefully they can reproduce their success in the future.
 
This is only the 5th successful Mars mission out of well over 20 launches.

The Americans have a success rate of only about 25%.
 
Sabastian said:
Don't get me wrong here it would have been nice to have the beagle 2 work out. I do not really care who has success, only that there is success. Certainly a failure on this mission from NASA would have caused financial stress politically, but that amounts to an expensive gamble that appears to have paid off in spades so far. I am not sure if the Beagle 2 is more capable in any way but surely would have produced a great bang for the buck.
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That was the nice thing about Beagle. If it had been successfully landed, it could have shown that you don't need to be the multi-billion dollar NASA to successfully send probes into space. IMO, Beagle was more important in the long term because it would have encouraged other smaller projects.

Sabastian said:
The flexibility in terms of exploration that the rover offers though is a great thing. Possibly a pre cursor to larger and even more sophisticated machinery being delivered to the Martian surface. There is no doubt that the rover is clearly a better exploratory solution simply based on the fact that it is very mobile and capable of taking samples from a wider variety of geology.
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The problem with Rover's exploration abilities is that they are not really enough. Sure it looks great on TV, but if you are in the middle of a plain or a desert, and can only rove a few miles, you are still very limited in terms of what you can find. It's not like Rover is going to trundle off and check out some of the volcano craters, canals or pole areas, because it's pretty much stuck in the very small area it landed in.
 
Beagle isn't the only "cheap probe". After Goldin took charge of NASA, for a few years, NASA tried the "faster, better, cheaper" approach, loading up probes with the newest unproven technology, building them faster, and cheaper. After two major failures, including Challenger, NASA is going back to the conservative route. Frankly, I'm surprised Spirit/Opportunity has a (rad hardened) PowerPC chip on it.

Stardust, DS1, DS2, Pathfinder, (and BMDO's Clementine), these are all "cheap" missions. NASA's strategy was to do "cheap" missions when trying to prove new technology (ion engines, aerogel sample collection, airbag landings) and then follow up with a more costly probe.
 
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
RussSchultz said:
Christ, can't you people keep your bigoted nationalism out of anything?
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Thanks for that great and intelligent contribution to the discussion... :rolleyes:
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Its more productive than joining in the ignorant penis waving that's going on.

For what its worth, if you want some schooling:
-ESA IS a multibillion dollar agency. I imagine the amount of work they do compared to NASA is about equal to the ratio of money the two agencies get.
-NASA has had 10 successful "mars missions", out of about 15 or so (http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/log/). Out of the 5 lander missions, 4 have sucessfully landed and returned data.
 
Brent said:
the pictures are black and white?

will it be taking any in color?
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Screw the pictures, I want videos of Martians doing the Hokey-Cokey!

MuFu.
 
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