Not sure if this counts as "Bad Astronomy", but in the new Transformers movie the ill-fated ESA mars mission "Beagle 2" is claimed to have been a NASA/JPL mission, and to add insult to injury also miraculously sprouted a mars rover component.

Was this in the teaser, or in the movie itself? The teaser got some pretty heavy BA debating in the Transformers movie thread.

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I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

It was in the teaser, which they also decided to place in the movie itself for no apparent reason and for no real purpose (well duh, of course the robots are alien, we don't need to see them stomping on Mars to know that!).

There's a website attached to this message board.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

oi! >.<, hands off our crashed probe!

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"Bessie Braddock to Churchill "Winston, your drunk!"
Churchill: "Bessie, you're ugly, and tomorrow morning I shall be sober""
the solar system

Ha! Finders keepers, homey!

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Hey, I didn't do it!

Seriously, you have to wonder how they manage to make a mistake like this. Doesn't it occur to them to check who built it? Or to think that this might annoy some folks and cost them sales?

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Evidently not. The sad reality is that few people would notice it, so they don't care enough to double check it.

I noticed it, too. It did seem superfluous, but it was brief. It is unlikely, but it may have been done tongue-in-cheek. Some movies using Morse code will often use some ham operator who takes some liberties since it is all in code anyway.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Two words: Artistic License

Two more: Insensitive Ignorance
(there's one for you linguistic analysts to chew on).

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"...wait for the ricochet."

that was just one of the many plot lines that had no place in the movie.


what did the Australian girl or her friend have to do with anything? Why crack the code if they aren't going to use it? Furthermore why even go through all that boringness of the code?

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

This isn't a mistake. This is a "Americans won't believe the Europeans are sending probes to other planets" decision. I'm actually fairly angry about it. This is U-571 all over again.

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"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive." - Carl Sagan, 1995

Oh puh-leez. It's a dumb move by ignorant hollywood types who likely didn't bother to do much in the way of research and probably wouldn't know the difference between a solar flare and a hemmorhoid, but would be pretty sure there's a cream for it.

Don't take everything hollywood does so seriously.

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"...wait for the ricochet."

If they hadn't done any research at all, they wouldn't have got names like Beagle 2 and JPL in their head. This sort of rewriting of history happens far too often for it to be attributed to simple mistakes.

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"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive." - Carl Sagan, 1995

It's a small thing from a small movie. There are much more important things to get worked up about in this world, man. Grab a pint and chill.

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"...wait for the ricochet."

To be fair, JPL is local to LA, and it doesn't take a heck of a lot of research to know about somewhere that appears on the local news now and again.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

It's like the Swift Goat Veterinarians for Truth. No mistake there.

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PW -- Plant Whisperer

Regardless of whether or not it was a mistake it peeves me off too. Either way they were saddling NASA with another failed Mars probe that they don't deserve the (dis)credit for. It wouldn't surprise me if it were intentional though, they even went to the trouble of making it look like a MER rover. I wonder how many people who saw that movie now think that NASA really was responsible for the real life Beagle 2 failure? The mistake in the teaser trailer of Beagle 2 depicted as a MER rover driving around a blue-skied Mars made me laugh, and I was kinda hoping they'd fix it for the movie or just cut the scene (yeah, unrealistic expectation, I know). Not only did they not fix or cut it, they made the blunder so large that the whole rover mistake seems like a nit-pick by comparison.

Bear in mind Beagle 2 failed, Mars Express succeeded. So I'm annoyed about NASA taking credit for getting something to Mars (difficult in itself), rather than NASA being saddled with a 'failed' mission. I know most Americans just think this is funny, but honestly if the roles were reversed you would be pretty mad.

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"I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive." - Carl Sagan, 1995

I wonder how those repo men hook up their wreckers to spacecraft, anyway...

Don't worry, I'm sure anyone uninformed enough to believe the movie when it calls Beagle 2 a NASA/JPL mission will have no idea what Mars Express is or its connection to Beagle 2, since it wasn't mentioned at all in the movie. That latter point should probably upset you though. In fact the whole matter is a bit of snub to the ESA because it fosters the perception that NASA is the only one