That dog, still dead

Back to the Royal Institution for another -- presumably the last -- Beagle post mortem. This one was a report put together by the Beagle team itself, edited by the mission manager, Mark Sims, who, frankly, looks a bit more drawn than I remember him from back in December and January. Not that that's much of a surprise.

The Pill came too, of course, but this is at least in principle Mark's show. He has two documents to present, a slim Lessons Learned (though when I say slim, that's because it's mostly just a list - there are 288 lessons there, which is quite a curriculum) and a final Mission Report that runs to 260 pages; as of today they’re available in pdf form here. They're a sort of brain dump by the spacecraft team -- everyone's thoughts on what might have gone wrong and how it might have been avoided. An independent report would be nicer, obviously -- but at least we can read this one.

Mark went through the highlights quickly. To summarise but not traduce: something might conceivably have happened when the spacecraft got shaken during launch, or when ice crusted on or near it in the cruise phase, but the team thinks that's very unlikely. Then, during entry, descent and landing, pretty much anything could have gone wrong. Sims said his personal nightmare was that something screwed up the antenna deployment -- that the spacecraft was sitting there all ready to do its stuff for days and days and just couldn't communicate.

The suggestion that abnormal atmospheric conditions -- specifically, low densities around 20km up -- may have been a problem came up again. Mark was open in saying that in some ways the atmospheric explanation might be seen as welcome; it gets the team a little off the hook, though not all the way off, as you could definitely say their design shouldn't have been so vulnerable to slight differences between the atmosphere they got and the one they expected. Anyway, the evidence for a thinner-than-modelled atmosphere is sparse, depending on some error rich data from Mars Express's Spicam instrument and slight anomalies in the MER landing timing which NASA people are quoted as downplaying a bit. (I was later given the impression that there may be more evidence in MER descent data that hasn't been made entirely public yet; we’ll see.) All told, I thought Sims did a pretty good job of opening the possibility up but not over-playing it.

In general, though, there was an odd tension to the whole event. On one side there was the admission that lots of things could have gone wrong, and that one of them surely did, even if none of the failure modes stands out, even in retrospect, as particularly likely. On the other side there was a tendency towards a the-operation-was-a-success-but-the-patient-died sort of attitude. That still doesn't really wash. But it's good to have a long list of lessons -- whatver happens next, they should be useful to someone, somewhere, sometime. (I particularly liked the one that says don't turn off the heating when the engineers are working all night...)

Scanning the documents later, a few things jump out at me, but that's not to say they're really significant. One is that the team isn't absolutely sure the spacecraft left Mars Express pointed in the right direction, though there’s no particularly good evidence that it didn’t. Another is the static discharge while the system was still on the ground that led to some components being replaced and others not. Another is that after redesigning the parachute, the team didn't do a full reanalysis of the danger that the new parachute might be more liable to snag the spacecraft or the airbags after landing than the old parachute had been. Another is that there were problems with overseeing the work that Martin Baker, an American firm, did on the EDL systems and the gasbags; US ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) considerations apparently got in the way. (Martin Baker left the project in 2001, after which Astrium took over their part of the deal.)

As I say, these things piqued my fancy, but they're not necessarily of any great import. The reports don't particularly play them up or down, and I have no reason to second guess them. The truth is that without EDL telemetry we were never likely to have a firm answer. (The Mars Polar Lander inquest was more conclusive, but that could easily be because there was a clearer smoking gun, rather than that the inquest process was more incisive.) One interesting detail is that work was done at one point on an EDL telemetry system, but it was abandoned when ESA said that there was no orbital or earthly asset that could be made ready to receive its signals. Was that really the case, I wonder. Or was it just felt that altering the Mars Express trajectory so that the orbital insertion burn came a bit later and the spacecraft was thus free to monitor Beagle’s descent was not worth the risk. (I don’t know enough astrodynamics to say whether such an alteration was really possible; insight welcome.)

That brings up one of the lessons learned which is mostly between the lines of the reports; that ESA’s ambivalence was bad for the project. The implication is that ESA always sort of expected Beagle 2 to drop out, so it never did more than tolerate its presence. One gem in the reports is that ESA didn’t actually send representatives to one or two of the critical design reviews. Yet at the same time, ESA didn’t actually cancel Beagle either. Now whether a more hands-on ESA would have resulted in better engineering is hard to say; but a firmer commitment might have led to better management and a more even cash flow.

It’s far from obvious that Colin would have welcomed a more intrusive interest, even if it was benign -- being the outsider, and an outsider quite clearly labelled as British, clearly suited some of the narratives he was spinning about the project, and quite possibly his own self-image. But it does seem to me that these reports make clearer than ever the fact that ESA should either have cancelled the project or thrown a little more into its success. I know -- if they had, and something had still gone wrong, and as a result the orbiter had been lost too, then the calamity would have been far greater. Hard call either way. I’m just saying how it looked from the cheap seats today.

The press conference ended, predictably, with future plans. Mark talked of a possible 2009 follow on mission. Colin, typically, said it was worth pushing for 2007. He has half a point –- as he sort of said, a 2009 Beagle-based mission would look a bit puny compared to NASA’s MSL. But he has no funding, and while ESA may have a commitment to “fallen comrades”, as the phrase has it, it may be that Beagle looks more like a fallen fellow traveller -- especially when the ESA science budget is very tight.

Colin also said that he’d written to NASA about the possibility of flying a Beagle package as part of the 2009 mission. He painted a sweet picture of the MSL scurrying around picking up samples and bringing them back to little Beagle for consideration. However, it’s very hard to believe that Colin really believes this is plausible, and there’s no reason at all why any of the rest of us should, despite the fact that this, to judge by the mood of the media at the meeting, will be the idea that gets picked up in the papers. MSL is going to be packed with American instruments aiming at many of the Beagle objectives, and the chances that a large number of them will be turfed off to free up mass for an anglo-european instrument package that’s the brainchild of a man quite willing to indulge in some America-bashing when it suits his purposes seem to me negligible. As in nil. Maybe Colin’s an eternal optimist. Maybe he’s trying to pick a fight, and thinks being rejected or ignored by NASA will help his case elsewhere. Your guess is probably as good as mine.

Comments

[Bruce Moomaw]

Colin Pillinger is either a fraud or nutttier than a $25 fruitcake -- or both. Does he seriously think that the MSL -- for no reason -- would (A) carry an entire separate stationary "Beagle" package to Mars and (B) spend its time carrying samples BACK to it, instead of (at most) carrying copies of Beagle's more valuable science instruments along with it?

What I've said before remains true: this man is the Ahmad Chalabi of planetary exploration.

[Alex R. Blackwell]

Well, Mark Sims is a first-rate guy, and very friendly, too. And though Pillinger could reasonably be called an eccentric, I'm not willing to label him a fraud or even a nut.

That said, I agree that his Beagle-on-MSL idea is a complete non-starter, and not just due to his "unique" personality. At any rate, this entire Beagle 2 issue is, in my opinion, starting to take on the characteristics of "A Mad Tea-Party" from Alice in Wonderland complete with its own version of the March Hare and the Hatter.

[Bruce Moomaw]

Well, YOU can say that, Alex. He didn't call YOU two nights in a row at 3 AM Pacific time to bitch about Jeffrey Bell's SpaceDaily article on him...

Actually, a more appropriate Lewis Carroll passage to describe Pillinger might be the scene in "Through the Looking Glass" in which the White King tells Alice, "There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint." When Alice questions this, the King snaps, "I didn't say there was nothing better. I said there was nothing LIKE it." Now substitute Pillinger for the King and Beagle for the hay...

[Matt]

Essentially: You've done the cheap seats reportage better than I could, and stirred the debate, so Cheers. Trackback and HTML comments absent from this blog, so refer to posts in Loop2.

[Oliver Morton]

Trackbacks now fixed

[Alex R. Blackwell]

Mars Global Surveyor
Mars Orbiter Camera
The MGS MOC Search for Beagle 2
MGS MOC Release No. MOC2-835, 31 August 2004
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2004/08/31/index.html

[Jeffrey F. Bell]

This whole debate about specific technical reasons that Beagle-2 might have failed is pointless. Just like several ultra-cheap Dan Goldin missions (e.g. DS-2), there were so many omissions of critical tests that many failure modes are possible. And with the complete lack of telemetry, there is no way for any failure board to choose between them. The reason the mission failed is that Colin Pillinger and his fellow Beagle cultists ignored the whole science of mission cost estimation. I was in charge of designing a Mars mission once, and when the computer cost model showed that we over the official cost cap, the project was stopped. Pillinger chose to press on regardless with a budget that was hopelessly inadequate, and is reaping the just rewards of his folly.

[Steven Alan]

Judging from the latest images of the landing site, I would say there was a pretty good chance it hit something nasty when it landed.

[Alex R. Blackwell]

There's also "a pretty good chance it hit something nasty when it [crashed]," assuming, of course, that it survived the entry and descent phase.

[Bruce Moomaw]

Well, if one acquaitance of mine is telling the truth (and I have no reason to think he's lying), Pillinger solenmnly told one TV interviewer before the launch that -- in spite of the fact that they had built Beagle 2 on a shoestring -- "We'll succeed because we're British." If true, this reinforces another comment by a noted Britisher, namely Robert Morley: "England breeds such lovely cranks." (Of course, as a Californian, I may be in no position to throw stones..)

[Oliver Morton]

On the DS-2 front, someone told me a little while ago that some models of the soil-bound-ice interpretation of the neutron data suggest that the soil could have been throughly enough frozen to kill the probes even if they had performed to spec, since their design assumed a looser regolith. No idea if a) this is true or b) the hard ice models are actually right, but it struck me as interesting. I guess Phoenix should shed some light on that.

[Alex R. Blackwell]

NASA rules out Beagle resurrection
By Lucy Sherriff
The Register
Published Friday 1st October 2004 16:27 GMT
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/01/nasa_cans_beagle/

[Alex R. Blackwell]

'Money woes' foiled Beagle 2 shot
BBC News
Last Updated: Tuesday, 2 November, 2004, 00:09 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3972849.stm

[Alex R. Blackwell]

Scientists lift veil on Beagle 3
By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter
Last Updated: Wednesday, 3 November, 2004, 18:00 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3977967.stm

[Siske]

I love this post Sam! Especially your grid for near term and long term goals. I don't think about goals very much. For being a total control freak (which I am), I am not much of a furtue planner. I hope Ryan gets a call from the Yankees someday, too!