Feb 3 2005

From The Space Library

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Current revision

ESA and the government of the United Kingdom (UK) officially published the report of the investigation into the circumstances and possible reasons for the failure of the Beagle 2 mission. Beagle 2, the Mars lander that had “piggybacked” aboard ESA's Mars Express Orbiter, had failed to communicate after its landing date of 25 December 2005. The UK government and ESA had commissioned the report in February 2004, and the commission had completed the report in April 2004. Initially, ESA and the UK government had refused to publish the report, citing details of confidential intergovernmental agreements, as well as commercially sensitive information. Instead, they had issued a set of recommendations for future missions. However, the New Scientist had requested the report's publication under the UK's new Freedom of Information Act, in force since the beginning of 2005. Colin Pillinger, the planetary scientist who had first proposed the Beagle 2 project, and Mark Sims, the mission's project manager~ both at the Open University in the UK~ agreed that the report contained little, if any, commercially sensitive information. However, the report concluded that ESA and the UK government should never have approved the project. ESA committee investigating the loss of the probe had found several fundamental errors, such as classifying the lander as an instrument aboard Mars Express, instead of as a separate spacecraft, and making inaccurate estimates about the characteristics of the Martian atmosphere. The committee also determined that ESA and the UK had underfunded the mission from the start. Moreover, the committee found that the mission's logistics were too complex for Pillinger's team. (British National Space Centre, “Beagle 2”; Justin Mullins, “Beagle 2 'Should Never Have Been Built',” New Scientist, 4 February 2005; BBC News, “Report Scorns Beagle 2 Decision,” 4 February 2005.)

The U.S. Air Force successfully launched two military satellites aboard an Atlas 3B, the last of Lockheed Martin's Atlas 3 rockets. The launch marked the 145th and final launch from Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, after 43 years of operation. NASA had built the complex in the early 1960s, specifically for its Atlas-Centaur program, which included the launches of NASA's historic Surveyor, Mariner, and Pioneer missions. Launches from the site had proved highly successful; the launch of the last Atlas 3B marked the 75th consecutive successful Atlas rocket launch, including all six Atlas 3 flights. Launch Complex 36 was one of the United States' oldest continuously operating launch sites and the last of the U.S. launch sites to use a traditional blockhouse to control the launch. The final Atlas 3B carried a pair of formation-flying, classified satellites, which analysts believed were part of the Naval Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS) of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). Satellites in the NOSS, a network for monitoring ships around the globe, were reportedly capable of detecting radio transmissions from ships to pinpoint their locations precisely. (Justin Ray, “Last Atlas 3 Rocket Launches a Pair of Spy Satellites” and “Atlas Rocket Workers Say Goodbye to Complex 36,” Spaceflight Now, 4 February 2005; Todd Halvorson, “Atlas 3 Climbs Through Fog to Final Successful Mission,” Florida Today (Brevard, FL), 4 February 2005.)

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