Yes, great chapter. I like the bit about after the fall of Soviet Union the KGB tries to sell satellite images of Great Britain to be used by Vodaphone for radio planning.
The character is a clown who is stuck in a serious situation. He's a funny guy, a joker, and that keeps him alive.
Matt Damon is a serious actor, who can do a serious character. Put a serious character into a funny situation, and it can be very funny. But put a serious character actor into a funny man role, and well... I'm hopeful, but worried.
If you like that kind of thing I'd recommend Rocket Girls (the novels rather than the animé), and Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth (nonfiction).
If Matthew mcConaughey docked to a spinnig station and sandra bullock re-entered to earth like that, then Matt damon can survive that, also Andy Wier reseached a lot about the plausability of every situtation, but I'm sure "hollywood" will make this stupidly unbelievable or magically believable.
In an interview, he said the most implausible / impossible thing in the book was actually the very first scene when there is a storm that can knock things over.
One time in a interview I got asked "If two robots are lost on mars and can't communicate with one another, how do they find each other? - please write a program outlining your thoughts"
I just want to be clear it took an actual space agency 11 years to pull this off and the company I interviewed at just backed up data for people.
If they can't communicate with each other, why would they want to meet?
Assuming Mars is featureless (if it has features, they can both climb Olympic mons, for instance, as Mike Ash already said) and they cannot leave Mars (if hey do, they could have agreed before to meet in a bar in, say, Paris), the solutions I can think of all are a bit impractical:
- both dig a hole to the center of Mars and wait there for the other to arrive.
- both spread themselves out over half the area of Mars.
- both self-replicate until they cover the surface.
- at least one of them starts annihilating Mars.
If they are allowed to discuss strategy beforehand, the following will work:
Both walk straight ahead along a great circle. When (not if; great circles cannot not intersect and not be the same) they meet the trail of the other, the slower one stops at the intersection, and waits for the faster one to return on its path.
It's easier to go to the North or South Pole, instead of the center of the planet, because you don't have to dig so much. As a guide you can use a gyrocompass that don't need a magnetic field for orientation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrocompass IANARS
>> Because the planet’s atmosphere is only about 1% as dense as Earth’s only the smallest dust grains hang in the air.
It should be possible to move a few larger rocks, maybe? Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity have robotic arms. Good image processing might or might not recognize patterns in the stones.
(Of course, compared to mikeash's answer, this is overengineering and only applicable if their conditions are not met (prearranged meeting point; we have a map and know our location))
Part of me hears stuff like this and just goes "let's get Curiosity to motor on over and..."
I am kind of hoping that at some point we'll drop a high-speed rover of some sort on Mars. Even if you took 6 months or a year, being able to cover a decent chunk of the planet would be a heck of a capability.
Was it just chance that the cameras would pass over that location, or was fuel spent, or other priorities diverted to discover this? That would be interesting to know, because I somewhat hope someone had to make sure we got these images and answers.
It looks like it might be as simple as one of the solar panels not flipping out to expose the radio. Such bad luck. Really goes to show how many things on a mission like this has to go right.
They did actually, the thing was designed to drop on a random angle and bounce around for a while on airbags until it came to a full stop, before said airbags would deflate and it would self-right itself by opening up. Here's an image with it having landed on an uneven surface: http://freespace.virgin.net/michael.jennings1/beagle.jpg
This is a good 'accidental' postmortem and provides a good example of how to not design a probe. Having many large parts move before radio contact is possible is bad design.
I have a new project: compare designs of Martian missions that succeeded, and contrast against those that didn't.
I think that's unlikely based on the design. Beagle 2 was in a flattened cylinder, a bit like a hat box, that was sealed shut to protect it on entry. After becoming stationary, the 'lid' would flip open and the round solar petals would unfurl.
If the lid opened allowing one of the petals to unfurl and break off during landing I wouldn't expect the rest of the petals to unfurl perfectly.
Is there any chance it still works at all? Probably not but I'm just curious. They said the problem was that the antenna was blocked under the solar panel.
(For anyone interested in the background to the Beagle2 probe, 'Backroom Boys'[1] includes a great chapter on it, and Prof Pillinger's involvement .)
[1]: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-British-...