History littered with failed Mars probes

PASADENA, California Thu Aug 2, 2012 7:51pm EDT


Credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser

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PASADENA, California (Reuters) - NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was about a week away from wrapping up an 11-month journey to the Red Planet in 1999 when engineers noticed a problem - the spacecraft, designed to study Mars' environment, was not where it was supposed to be.

The gap grew alarmingly over the next few days. On September 23, Climate Orbiter began the brake to enter Mars' orbit as planned, but disappeared behind the planet 49 seconds early, severing radio contact with Earth. It was never heard from again.



"This is the hardest NASA robotic mission ever attempted," NASA's associate administrator for science John Grunsfeld told reporters during a pre-landing news conference last month.

To deliver the one-ton robotic geologist near the mountain's base, engineers designed a contraption that would make cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg beam. The rover, about the size of a Mini Cooper car, is too heavy to bounce to the planet's surface in airbags or fly itself with rocket thrusters, systems successfully used by six previous NASA landers.


"We've done everything we could. We've tested everything we could test. We built everything to the best of our ability," said Doug McCuistion, who oversees NASA's Mars exploration programs. "Once you understand it, it's not a crazy concept."


Launch failures claimed nearly half of Russia's probes, including the ambitious Phobos-Grunt sample return mission last year. Other spacecraft sailed blindly past Mars or burned up in the planet's atmosphere during landing attempts.

Newcomers Japan and China have fared no better. Only Europe, which operates the Mars Express orbiter, has had beginner's luck on Mars.

"We learn from these things even if they aren't successful," McCuistion said.



And even when the engineering is perfect, Mars itself can throw mean curve balls. NASA's Mariner 9 and two Soviet orbiters arrived in May 1971 to find a global-wide dust storm in progress.

"We don't have the capability to predict these things," McCuistion said. "That is why Mars wins an awful lot of the time."

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Jackie Frank)

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