UK Space Agency justify loss of Beagle 2 on Mars - Video

UK Space Agency continue to justify expenditure and efforts to launch Beagle 2 lander.

Grainy images picked up by NASA MRO HiRise camera scanning Mars.

UK Space Agency Announce discovery of Beagle-2 on Mars

Following a lengthy and protracted briefing by the UK Space Agency, they finally acknowledged the discovery of the Beagle 2 on Mars by the HiRise camera on MRO.

The UK Agency seemed to feel the need to promote their apparent expertise and kudos before breaking the news before showing off the grainy images.

This is one of the images shown at the briefing. It is far from clear but we are assured it contains the component parts of the UK's failed Beagle 2.

More than 11 years after UK Mars probe Beagle 2 was lost, believed crashed, space scientists are set to reveal new findings about what hapened to the spacecraft.

Mystery surrounds exactly what will be disclosed by experts from the European Space Agency and the underfunded, struggling, UK Space Agency at the English National Academy of Science, known as the Royal Society in London on Friday, but it has raised hopes that orbiting spacecraft around Mars might have located the debris of the Beagle 2.

The probe was the brainchild of the eccentric, mutton-chopped Professor Colin Pillinger, of the UK’s Open University, who died suddenly in May 2014 from a brain haemorrhage.

Beagle 2 was carried to Mars by ESA’s Mars Express which remains in orbit to this day performing valuable surveys of the planet.

Beagle was due to land on Christmas Day 2003, but nothing was ever heard from the tiny craft.

Experts later concluded that its parachute had failed in the extra thin atmosphere and it hit the ground too hard.

Months later, Colin called an impromptu press conference, convinced that he had identified a speck in a photo of the martian surface as his lost probe, but later higher-resolution imagery from a NASA orbiter showed there was nothing.

This recent announcement would indicate that this time there is hope that something really has been spotted.

The panel at Friday’s announcement will include Beagle 2’s mission manager Professor Mark Sims, Dr John Bridges of Leicester University’s Space Research Centre, the European Space Agency’s director of science and robotic exploration Alvaro Giménez, and David Parker, of Durham University and the underfunded UK Space Agency.

A recent image from the HiRise camera on the NASA MRO. 

Credit: NASA, JPL, University of Arizona

All are remaining tight-lipped about what will be revealed, but interestingly, Dr Bridges is a member of the team working with the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is the only imager powerful enough to pick out the debris of Beagle 2, or any other probe, from orbit.

John Zarnecki, Emeritus Professor of Space Science, and Professor Pillinger’s former colleague, told reporters: “I don’t know what they will announce. All one can think of is that they might have got an image of the probe, but if Beagle 2 is in a thousand pieces, it is unlikely that we will have found the pieces.”

“When dear old Colin was alive, he imagined he could see the Beagle 2 in single pixels. None of us could see it, he was the only one who could. So if they really have found it this time, it would be wonderful.”

Professor Zarnecki, who headed the OU’s Planetary and Space Sciences department, said that finding Beagle 2 would be an important event, but there was no chance that it could still work.

He said: “The probe will be dead. There could be no battery life and it would have frozen probably. Electronic materials and components don’t like the cold of Mars very much.”

“The main thing is that it could tell us something about how and why it failed. We’re not going to get anything scientific out of it now, but anything we can learn about how and why it failed informs our designs for the future.

“One of the reasons why space missions on the whole are so successful is that we do learn from experience. It is similar to why flying by plane is so safe - we learn from failures.”

Professor Zarnecki had his own experiment on Beagle 2, a tiny device to measure temperature, air pressure, and wind-speed and direction, “like a weather station, but a fancy one”, he said.

SABRE Engine: Skylon spaceplane's revolutionary engine passes key milestone

Illustration of the Skylon spaceplane powered by SABRE engines. 

Credit: REL/Adrian Mann

A revolutionary new air-breathing rocket engine designed to propel a spacecraft to orbit in a single stage has passed a critical milestone.

The engine could also revolutionise air travel, reducing journey times around the planet to under 4 hours.

The engine, called SABRE, is a hybrid of a jet engine and a rocket engine. An aircraft fitted with the engines could fly to other side of the planet in under 4 hours travelling at Mach 5.5. more than five times the speed of sound, whilst a spaceplane such as Skylon could be propelled into orbit in a single stage.

The engines breathe in air as they pass through the atmosphere, meaning the spaceship could launch without a fully laden fuel load.

However, the challenge of the design has been how to cool the huge amount of air it continuously breathes in without the engine freezing up.

The testing has proved that SABRE's pre-cooler heat exchangers can cool air from over 1,000⁰C to minus 150⁰C in less than 1/100th of a second without the engine frosting up.

The UK company which invented the new propulsion technology, Reaction Engines Limited (REL) described the successful testing as "the biggest breakthrough in aerospace propulsion technology since the invention of the jet engine".

REL has also devised a spaceplane called Skylon that would be fitted with the SABRE engines. Skylon would take off and land on runways, and would not require any part of the craft to be jettisoned during its journey to orbit.

This would make it a completely reusable spacecraft which could reduce the time and cost of launching payload into space.

REL believe the cost of launching satellites could be cut by 90% if the SABRE powered Skylon entered service.



The UK Space Agency asked experts from the European Space Agency (ESA) to validate the pre-cooler heat exchanger test results

ESA experts who reviewed the testing concluded "The pre-cooler test objectives have all been successfully met and ESA are satisfied that the tests demonstrate the technology required for the SABRE engine development."

The SABRE engine has the potential to revolutionise our lives in the 21st century in the way the jet engine did in the 20th Century. This is the proudest moment of my life. Alan Bond, REL

Illustration of the SABRE engine with the location of the pre-cooler heat exchanger highlighted in blue. Credit: REL/Adrian Mann

SABRE Engine: The Biggest Breakthrough In Propulsion Since The Jet Engine

The SABRE engine has the potential to revolutionise lives in the 21st century in the way the jet engine did in the 20th Century.

Reaction Engines can announce the biggest breakthrough in aerospace propulsion technology since the invention of the jet engine.

Critical tests have been successfully completed on the key technology for SABRE, an engine which will enable aircraft to reach the opposite side of the world in under 4 hours, or to fly directly into orbit and return in a single stage, taking off and landing on a runway.

SABRE, an air-breathing rocket engine, utilises both jet turbine and rocket technology. Its innovative pre-cooler technology is designed to cool the incoming airstream from over 1,000C to minus 150C in less than 1/100th of a second (six times faster than the blink of an eye) without blocking with frost.

The recent tests have proven the cooling technology to be frost-free at the crucial low temperature of -150C.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has evaluated the SABRE engine's pre-cooler heat exchanger on behalf of the UK Space Agency, and has given official validation to the test results: "The pre-cooler test objectives have all been successfully met and ESA are satisfied that the tests demonstrate the technology required for the SABRE engine development."

Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts said: "This is a remarkable achievement for a remarkable company.

Building on years of unique engineering know-how, Reaction Engines has shown the world that Britain remains at the forefront of technological innovation and can get ahead in the global race. This technology could revolutionise the future of air and space travel."

Well over 100 test runs, undertaken at Reaction Engines Ltd's facility in Oxfordshire, integrated the ground-breaking flight-weight cooling technology and frost control system with a jet engine and a novel helium cooling loop, demonstrating the new technologies in the SABRE engine that drive its highly innovative and efficient thermodynamic cycle.

This success adds to a series of other SABRE technology demonstrations undertaken by the company including contra-rotating turbines, combustion chambers, rocket nozzles, and air intakes and marks a major advance towards the creation of vehicles like SKYLON - a new type of reusable space vehicle that will be powered by SABRE engines, designed primarily to transport satellites and cargo into space.

Alan Bond, who founded Reaction Engines to re-build the UK's rocket propulsion industry and has led the research from the start, said: "These successful tests represent a fundamental breakthrough in propulsion technology.

Reaction Engines' lightweight heat exchangers are going to force a radical re-think of the design of the underlying thermodynamic cycles of aerospace engines.

These new cycles will open up completely different operational characteristics such as high Mach cruise and low cost, re-usable space access, as the European Space Agency's validation of Reaction Engines' SABRE engine has confirmed.

The REL team has been trying to solve this problem for over 30 years and we've finally done it. Innovation doesn't happen overnight. Independent experts have confirmed that the full engine can now be demonstrated.

The SABRE engine has the potential to revolutionise our lives in the 21st century in the way the jet engine did in the 20th Century. This is the proudest moment of my life."

Dr Mark Ford, ESA's Head of Propulsion Engineering, said: "One of the major obstacles to developing air-breathing engines for launch vehicles is the development of lightweight high-performance heat exchangers.

With this now successfully demonstrated by Reaction Engines Ltd, there are currently no technical reasons why the SABRE engine programme cannot move forward into the next stage of development."