dip_79 said:

>I wonder if the beagle 2 team has simulated a beagle 2 landing with
> data from one of the MER landings. Would be interesting to see if their
> models (for entry, parachutes, software algorithms, etc...) show
>if it’s survivable. Obviously the simulation would only be as good
>as the models, but I would still be interested in the results.

The atmospheric models reconstructed from Viking's I, II and Mars Pathfinder are in the open literature (scientific journals by the American Geophysical Union). The atmospheric models used for MER-A and B came from Mars-GRAM and the Mars Global Circulation model. The guys with Beagle-2 probably had access to Mars-GRAM. MER's forebody heat shield was designed by two independent teams. One team was with Lockheed-Martin and the other was with NASA Ames. The software used by Lockheed-Martin were in-house codes. The program used by NASA Ames was something that I wrote. We'd have these periodic design reviews where the two teams would present their results. The results of the two teams were almost always very close. This gave the bosses a warm and fuzzy feeling. However the design heritage for both Lockheed-Martin and NASA came from the same source, i.e. the work of "Old NASA" rocket scientists (brilliant guys) who were active during 1957-1968. It's quite possible that both my software and Lockheed-Martin's could have common errors because we both refered to the same Old NASA engineers. Beagle-2's engineers probably had access to military reentry vehicle codes. Military reentry vehicles (RV) and planetary exploration spacecraft have some things in common but also major differences, e.g. military RVs always have very narrow half angles (11 deg.), small nose radii and are always designed assuming the atmosphere is composed of air. Being limited to military RV software might have been the compelling reason for Beagle-2's engineers not to include effects from the carbon dioxide in the martian atmosphere.

Gary