EDIT: Moved these posts from the Feb 14 HiRISE Release thread to here to collect all Beagle 2 search related stuff in one place.

I'm downloading them now too -- guess I can't blog about them until I've examined them very carefully!

For a bit of history on the search,
Here's a blog entry I wrote about this spot a while ago
Here's the MOC team's take on that spot
And here's the BBC page with the Beagle 2 team's take on it

EDIT: and here's my updated blog entry with links to the Beagle 2 landing ellipse images split up into 40-MB chunks.

--Emily

Hmm...after a quck glance nothing on these pictures seems to be a sign from Beagle. Otherwise, the crater is indeed an interesting feature. Look at the walls - what could this be? Hematite?

There are two HiRISE images labeled as being Beagle 2 related sites. One of them, 2347_1915, clearly crosses the ellipse, and includes the dark crater imaged by MOC. The other one, 2136_1920, is centered 0.1 degree of latitude north and 0.2 degrees of longitude east, or about 6 and 12 plus or minus 3 kilometers north and east, of the first one. I am having a hard time locating this on the best MOC context image I can find. Is it out of the ellipse drawn by the MOC team?

Here is the MOC ellipse at 30 m/pixel:
Click to view attachment

Here is 2347_1915 at 30 m/pixel:
Click to view attachment

And here is 2136_1920 at 30 m/pixel:
Click to view attachment

--Emily

Here's the area right around that dark crater.
Click to view attachment
--Emily

So... it's sure that Beagle 2 is not in this area... or am I wrong?

Well - I've not looked at every sq. foot of the >1GB that those two images include....but I intend to.

Doug

Doug, can you recommend me a good jp2 viewer? Do I have a chance to open this with an ancient hardware - CPU 800 Mhz, 192 ram?

Sorry to be brutal - but with that spec, it's just not worth it. I use a package recommended here - http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/jp2.html - called OpenEV. 1.7 Ghz Centrino CPU and 2 Gb of ram is barely enough.

Doug

I am working on cutting up the part of the .jp2 that crosses the ellipse into more manageable chunks of 30-40 MB each in PNG format. I'll post those on the blog by the end of the day today, so if your computer or your modem (or your patience) can't manage the 800 MB .jp2 files, wait for those.

--Emily

One of them's easy to place - but not t'other - is it even in this shot?


edit....found it - and updated the JPG.

Doug

Notice what apparently is a large boulder/ejecta block at the 11 o'clock position of the crater. I'm reminded of House Rock at the Apollo 16 landing site.

A small house - I make that rock approx 1m across

This bright rock is on the northern inner slope of the larger crater just to the east - 6.5 metres across...that's more housey

Okay, then Outhouse Rock, which was a smaller rock immediately adjacent to House Rock at the Apollo 16 site.

Or, given the size, perhaps "Doghouse Rock"

To be fair you posted a link to "Astronaut Charles Duke stands at rock adjacent to "House Rock""



Doug

Actually, the rock in that photo depicted in that photo isn't House Rock, which was much larger.

I know - that's what the caption says.

Doug

I lost track of the scale because I forgot I was looking at a HiRISE image instead of a MOC NA image.

Emily has a new blog entry.

...and it contains the links to the pieces of the one HiRISE image that crosses the ellipse. Go have a look and see if you can find anything interesting!

Emily

Outhouse Rock was indeed the smaller rock (roughly the size of an outhouse) that had split off from House Rock. Interestingly, while Charlie Duke christened the large rock House Rock ("Well, that's your House Rock, right there"), he made it sound like they had talked about finding "rocks the suize of houses" pre-flight, but according to all of the interviews I;ve read, they hadn't -- Duke just came up with the name on the fly.

That said, I bet there are tons and tons of house-sized rocks on Mars...

-the other Doug

Thank you, Emily! The chunks will help us a lot.

Does anyone happen to know the IR characteristics of Beagle 2's chute, solar panels, etc.? I've got this imagery software called ENVI on a temp license for a class, and would like to try looking over these chunks with it.

Thanks!

When I get home tonight I'll check if any specific materials are used in the 'chute or airbags - but I would expect them to be fairly identical to MER. The airbags were made by the same people for instance. The book I referenced in the simulation image is essentially THE opus on Beagle 2. If it's not in there, it's probably not in the public domain at all.

Doug

I have a candidate for the heatshield...

A candidate...

From the image I post (not the best quality I know...) it might not look so different from any other rock but if you check Emily's full image (bottom row, center), you'll see that this specific spot (located approximately at 12h inside the big crater on the left center of the image) looks more "shiny" than the surrounding features.
The problem is that I don't find anything resembling other components...
I'll keep looking...

Starting a thread for possible B2 stuff within HiRISE images...I think it needs its own thread.

People may find these usefull..


http://video.beagle2.com/Descent/play_descent_a_640x368.htm
http://video.beagle2.com/Landing/play_landing_b_640x368.html

Doug

From your 3D rendering I would change my candidate from possible heatshield to possible Beagle 2...

Fair play to you - it's an interesting target.

The thing I think we need to be careful of is that these images are re-projected and so any single cosmic-ray event or anything else of that nature (as shown here - http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2007/d..._1920_cut_b.jpg ) might - even if only a single pixel in the downlinked image - show itself as more than a pixel in a reprojected image.

That said - I've done a comparison between that target and the the heatshield in my sim - and it's not a million miles apart. I do my sim's at 33cm/pixel now - it just seems more realistic in terms of resolving power - so I've upscaled my 33cm/pixel render to 25cm/pixel and put it side by side.

I personally don't expect to see a deployed B2 on the surface. If it were there, I would expect to see a very obvious chute nearby, as well as airbags.

My point too Doug...

And thanks for the images, that's precisely the place I was talking about!

While you were doing you're comparison I was entertained with something similar...
(I've rotated your rendition 90º to the left)

So...If it not deployed how would it look like?...

Depends how much of the EDL sequence worked.

Burnt up during entry : Nothing on ground
Survived re-entry but dead on arrival : that estimated crater size
Main Chute deployed but no airbag inflation - Large chute, probably a small 'splat' mark nearby.
Chute deployed - airbags inflated but B2 died on impact - Large Chute, one large composite airbag mess of all 3 bags.

Everything worked but B2 didn't open and deploy - Large chute, three airbag lobes, and an unopened lander would look fairly similar to the heatshield alone I would guess. HOWEVER - that would suggest some sort of failure after a great landing but before deployment and I find that a hard scenario to believe.

I think you're probably reading too much into a probably imaging artifact - BUT - it's certainly on the list of 'hmm - interesting'

Also - be carefull of rotating things. I set the lighting in that simulation to match the average lighting for HiRISE looking at near equatorial sites. I've not adjusted it to exactly match the parameters of the image we're looking at - but it's there or there abouts. Rotating things puts the shadow in a different place etc etc.


Doug

Yes, probably...as usual...
I'll just let the masters work...

Beagle Splat?

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Looks like the main chute didn't fully deploy and Beagle 2 hit hard.

Could you give a more exact location?

You're zoomed out by about 5x... to give you a sense of scale - this is at 100% - and is the area you mark as 3 airbags is actually two small craters and a pile of rocks. what you mark as Heatshield is infact a bright dune.


Doug

Are we looking at the same area?

Yes - you're zoomed out a huge ammount - perhaps firefox has downsized the image to fit in your browser window?

Doug

I used Stereo Photo Maker with the 2.5 Mb jpg image. Will download the jp2 and check again. I guess you have done that. Pitty that, it was all there, in a line and what one would expect of a very vertical rapid foiled chute descent.

The three rocks around the dark cross shape with an attached medium bright rock sure looks interesting.

Click to view attachment

I used the wrong image scale. Sorry for that.

I know that I promised to stand still and I also know that you guys are not great fans of this kind of pseudo-perspective but I couldn't avoid it...

But it might help one way or the other.

It looks to me that the spot I indicated is not an artifact, if you look to this image it looks like there is a crater under it and some shadowing.
This also helps me imagine how painful might have been Beagle's end...
Who knows if it might just crumbled down the hill on it's back, does anyone see a parachute there?

What do you gain by reprojecting the image like that, Ustrax?

That bright feature (artifact ?) does look interesting, though. Still, it seems like a lucky shot to be finding it in the first of the strips covering the entire landing ellipse.

ugordan, some sense of perspective I don't get with the original one...
It would REALLY be a lucky shot, as I told previously it is just a candidate...
But hey! If it was done once...

THERE'S YOUR PROBLEM.

Instead of looking at a 2048 x 4983 image - get the full-fat 812Mb 28247 x 68730 image

Doug

After The BA mentioned Emily's blog entry about this HiRISE image - Andrew commented on a feature that I've pulled out of PSP_002347_1915_RED_r2c3.png - Alex will be calling it house rock before too long although to be fair - that segment off to the left does look like the orange-segment sort of shape one would expect from the airbags....BUT....if the vehicle was healthy enough to fire the pyyros to drop away from the airbags - one would expect a working vehicle on the surface.

The 'killer find' still has to be either the 10m diameter parachute or a fresh crater + debris.

Which is why I think we won't have a problem identifying it when it's imaged - it just hasn't been imaged yet. There's a whole lot of that ellipse that still needs examining. I'm guessing it's up-range.

Why up-range? Wouldn't it be down-range if parts of the EDL system (especially the parachute) didn't work correctly?

--Emily

I wasn't pegging it the failure on EDL malfunctions. I was thinking of atmospheric aberrations as the cause. (But I haven't really put a lot of thought into it.)

As it turns out, the atmospheric aberrations caused both MERs to land downrange of the centers of their ellipses, so Beagle 2 probably would have done the same (which is why the MOC imaging campaign focused on the eastern half of the ellipse). I don't have any idea what effect EDL malfunctions might have had -- I'm guessing they would also have resulted in a downrange bias but I don't have a clue what the magnitude of that would be, whether 1 or 10 kilometers or more.

--Emily

Then I guess I'll only throw down a few small chips on that up-range bet

This is certainly a good candidate - If I understand Doug's scaling, the crater is about the right size for a Beagle splat. Spirt's parachute just barely deployed in time to save a similar fate, so splat it could be.

Here I am again...

I grabbed Beagle's last known image and used it in a personal simulation.
It has some similarities with Doug's original image but quite different from his simulated view.
I also added Beagle 2 dimensions, can anyone tell me if the spot's pixels match those?

I have to say, that bright object seems to be too bright to be an ordinary rock. It's also slightly blurry which a cosmic ray artifact wouldn't be. I think it's not too far-fetched to suggest that might really be a manmade object. Whether it's the lander itself or a piece of it, who knows?

Then again, maybe it's just one of them iron meteorites...