Gbaikie made the following comment:

>Probably, Beagle's main failure, is that it wasn't designed well enough to allow
>us to know where it failed. And this same lack of commitment to the art of
>landing a spacecraft successful on the martian surface was also demonstrated
>by NASA.

Because Beagle-2 did not provide real time telemetry in combination with so many basic issues with its design, it will be impossible to pin-point the cause of failure. It's likely that many things went wrong at once or one failure prevented other failures from occuring down stream. After the face saving rhetoric quiets down, Beagle-2's design will probably get bounced off the bottom of a dumpster.

Gbaikie also alluded to the failure to provide real time telemetry with Mars Polar Lander (MPL). This was a major failing with MPL. MPL had Dan Goldin's finger prints all over it through his faster-better-cheaper nonsense. The MPL accident investigation team found a software glitch concerning landing leg deployment and blamed that. I suspect MPL was already dead before the landing legs deployed. No one has adequately explaned why the two DS-2 spacecraft attached to MPL failed. My gut feeling tells me the cause of failure would have to be common between MPL and the two DS-2 scacecraft. This could only be the cruise ring. A pyrotechnic failure on the cruise ring might have been the actual cause.

One of the "lessons learned" from the MPL screw-up was the requirement of real time telemetry for future Mars landers. It says something that it required an accident to re-learn this basic lesson. There was much bitching about this requirement during the design of Mars Exploration Rover (MER). Real time telemetry requires line-of-sight communication with the lander to Earth during landing. This additional requirement further over-defines the landing conditions. There are always the requirements of celestial mechanics, landing site and terminator location. Ideally the vehicle should land in early morning just before sun rise. That's when the atmosphere has its highest density and the parachute is most effective. They could not achieve that with MER. MER is landing at about 1:00 PM local time. It'll be a good thing when a ring of communication relay satellites (like TDRS) are orbiting Mars.

Gary