Dead Dog

So, at a press conference in London this afternoon, Colin Pillinger declares Beagle 2 all but officially dead. The latest round of attempted communications turned up nothing, and there is no plausible scenario in which the spacecraft has not yet transmitted anything at a time when we've been listening but is still capable of transmitting something. There is a last chance involving a reboot procedure, but it's clear that almost no hope at all is held out for it. On February sixth, it appears, the decision to draw a line under the mission. But as Pillinger says, everyone involved is now "looking to the future" -- specifically, the possibility of reflying the Beagle payload in some way or other in 2007.

There will be an inquiry, or a review, under the auspices of ESA. No-one yet knows who will chair it or serve on it. Its biggest problem will be that Beagle was out of contact from the moment when it left Mars Express, and so ascertaining when whatever went wrong went wrong is going to be hard. (The flight team is currently reanalysing all the data from before the separation to make sure that Beagle 2 was absolutely OK up until then). It's worth noting that Spirit and Opportunity both sent back telemetry all through their descent - and, as I understand it, the decision to arrange matters so that they could stay in constant touch actually increased the risk of failure, because it constrained their descent times to the mid afternoon, which is when the wind risks were highest. The need to know what had gone wrong if there was an accident trumped the need to minimise the risk of an accident.

If you're running a program that needs to learn from its mistakes, that's a good position to take (and one mandated by NASA, I think, after the telemetry-free loss of Mars Polar Lander). Colin insists that there was no way at all that the mass for a telemetry system that worked during entry, descent and landing could have been freed up. Unfortunately, that now makes it harder to turn the one-off Beagle 2 mission into an  ongoing program - which is what the Pill is angling for. If no one can ever say for sure why Beagle 2 failed, the case for trying again is clearly weakened. Every time the team would say "we've thought of everything" the sceptical reply would be "you said that last time".

While we're at it, it might be quite a good idea at this point to provide an open accounting of who paid what for the project, a subject on which I for one am still rather hazy (for example, there was once talk of 10 million pounds in sponsorship: how much of this materialised, and did the British Government made up the difference?) 

I have a certain ambivalence to all this. I would have loved it if Beagle had got safely to the surface and made its measurements.  For a long time I had doubts that it was going to be able to, because it just seemed a priori unlikely that a team with no experience of running planetary missions would be able successfully to mount an ambitious one at a headlong rush on a tiny budget. They weren't deeply informed reservations - just doubts. They might have been erased - or confirmed - if I had done some reporting on the project, but Colin, while always being perfectly pleasant to me when we met, made it clear I was a journalist he didn't want too close. He declined to speak to me when I was assigned to write about Beagle 2 first by Science and then by the Telegraph magazine. That's his right, though it pissed me off at the time.

So with no professional reason to spend a lot of time thinking about Beagle 2 I came to the opinion that, since it was going to go ahead anyway, I should just sit back and hope for the best. Writing anti-Beagle stories - "Why is the government spending so much on something which has only a 50-50 chance of success?" etc - seemed unproductive and even a little unsporting. And the possibility of success was beguiling. Now that possibility is no more, it seems that at least some of those questions really should be asked before we start talking about reflying the mission in 2007, as Colin was today. For example, it would be nice to know more about the reasons why a Beagle follow on didnt even make the shortlist when it was proposed for the 2007 Mars Scout opportunity.

If you want really vituperative anti-Beaglism, though, I'm not your guy -- Jeffrey Bell is. Bell's the only person I know of who has actually argued in public that Beagle 2's demise is a good thing. Bell, an astronomer based in Hawaii, is outspoken in a way that can be quite brave -- I remember him standing up to Dan Goldin rather magnificently at a space science meeting in the early 1990s. There's some merit in some of the points in his argument that the Beagle's demise is something to be welcomed; other parts seem poorly founded, and one aside is foolishly malicious in a way that only ignorance of what the accusation actually means in context could come close to excusing.

Comments

[Frderick Thurber]

I do not know the specifics and can only speculate, but it appeared to me that before the "landing" Colin was much more interest in the science aspect of the lander instead of the engineering part. I suspect that most of the work on Beagle went into jamming as much instrumentation into the lander at the expense of EDL engineering and testing. The loss of the Beagle 2 is a great tragedy because it would have openned an inexpensive path to Mars. In the unlikely even that England ever attempts to land on Mars again, I hope the learn from thei mistake and put most of their engineering effort into EDL and testing. The curious thing is that Nasa/JPL learned to do just this after the failure of the Polar lander, but for some reason Colin et. al. decided to ignore this lesson.

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Do you mean his aside about the National Front? That's certainly what leapt out at me--a genuinely over-the-top not-funny accusation, comparable to that Bush Administration official calling the teachers' union a "terrorist organization."

(Though I have to tell you, without your semi-endorsement I would have stopped reading after the guy outed himself as a crank anti-Stratfordian.)

[Oliver Morton]

Yes, it was the NF thing I was referring to. I kind of took the Shakespeare thing to be a joke I didn't get (and I wasn't feeling too bad about that) but you may be right in thinking it sincere...

There'll be a Beagle post-mortem/prospects-of-reflight meeting in London next week. I'll try and get along and blog it.

[Bruce Moomaw]

Bell is a sort-of sidekick of mine; as fellow writers for "SpaceDaily" (I was the one who got him into it), we have very frequent E-mail discussions in which we click our tongues to each other about the stupidity and moral depravity of the current American manned space program. I will agree, though, that he tends to go over the top in his personal attacks; he's always enthusiastically embraced the role of the Terrible Tempered Mr. Bang of Planetary Science. (You should have seen the original before I told him to tone it down -- including the passage in which he compared Pillinger to Doctor Who. Unfortunately, I overlooked the National Front reference.)

Anyway, I think Oliver's "Prospect" piece is terrific (as does Bell). I also think his January "National Geographic" Mars article is terrific -- as well as being the most utterly up-to-date planetary science article I have ever seen, anywhere, at any time, in a mass-market publication. But then, I have yet to see anything he's ever done anywhere that didn't strike me as top-notch.

I wish I had some advance word on tomorrow's Meridiani press conference, but they're keeping the revelations firmly under wraps. Some indications I'm seeing in the raw photos from the rover, though -- all of which have been released, although without commentary -- lead me to suspect that it may not only have discovered evidence of Noachian surface liquid water on Mars; it just may have found signs of small amounts of liquid water trickling out of the surface of the rock outcrop RIGHT NOW (although this may be just atmospheric water vapor condensing in the rock's pores). We'll see whether I've guessed right.

[Bruce Moomaw]

P.S.: I'm not sure whether the Shakespeare thing is a joke or not. One comment he's dropped to me suggests that he really may have Edward de Vere pegged as the real author, but I'm not sure he wasn't fooling.

[Bruce Moomaw]

And I agree with Fred Thurber about the trouble with Beagle -- the science payload was splendid, but the spacecraft carrying it was utterly crappy: pathetically underfunded and undertested. And Pillinger DOES have a very strong streak of megalomania in him; he was constantly going on before the landing about Those Stupid Americans and how they lacked the imagination to realize that you could do Great Things in Mars exploration for only a tiny fraction of the money NASA was spending to build its Mars landers. My God, he even proposed - repeatedly -- a complete Mars sample return mission in which the lander (complete with the Mars ascent rocket to launch the sample back into Mars orbit) was based on a SLIGHTLY enlarged version of Beagle 2! (Abstracts on request.)

I wish Beagle's science payload had been carried on Mars Pathfinder, instead of that revoltingly cute but scientifically rather unproductive little rover. We would already know a hell of a lot more about Mars than we do now, had this been done.

[Oliver Morton]

Bruce, I'm sorry you cut out the Dr Who reference -- indeed, it might be a viable future option. The BBC is currently casting a new series of Dr Who, and if Pillinger were to get the role it might avert all sorts of future mischief (Bill Nighy, who played the aging rocker in "Love Actually" is a more likely prospect).

I'm not sure you're right, though, about Sojourner. Scientifically unproductive, yes -- but in terms of making Mars exploration a web-mediated reality to many many people I think it was crucial. If Pathfinder had just sat there sniffing and occasionally grinding things (that's assuming the Beagle package would actually have worked) it would have been a lot less of an impetus to the program. (If it had found methane, things would be different, I agree). And I don't know enough of the athena/MER history to know whether Sojourner development was crucial to getting them working, but surely it helped at least a little...

[Bruce Moomaw]

Actually, when you get right down to it, Pillinger would make an excellent Dr. Who -- even his obsession with soccer is exactly the sort of eccentricity we've come to expect from the Doctor ("Fasinating Earth game...") All we need to do now is find a fetching young female companion for him -- maybe Helen Sharman, Britain's first astronaut (albeit in an incredibly unlikely and humiliating way). Jeffrey Bell, of course, would be the Master, complete with acid sarcasm.

There is one problem, though: Beagle 2 failed because the project turned out to be smaller on the inside than it looked on the outside. And it seems unlikely to me that Pillinger will ever be able to regenerate it...

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