Quote:
Originally Posted by svandamme
beagle 2 succesfully landed.. confirmed
it just didn't deploy it's stuff after landing to communicate back home and report the landing
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So it made it to the ground and died. Or did it just smash into the surface and make an new impact crater.
I love the fact that the EU, China and Russia, Japan and Israel are sending scientific probes to other off world locations. It does not need to be all USA. It is much like the F1 racing in recent years, Mercedes is the clear and undisputed leader. No other team is close to the same level. Budget, and hiring the top engineers is the only real difference. No magic, just the best engineering.
If you go to the Smithsonian and look at the inside of the Apollo space craft now 50+ years later you can see how crude and low tech they are, yet at the time they were the literal peak of engineering. The very first user programmable computer that accepted push button commands and so many technologies invented just for the task at hand.