Japanese Mars Probe Failing

Anonymous Coward writes "After months of silence and a week of hopeful half-truths, Japanese space officials have finally confirmed that their Mars-bound Nozomi probe is teetering on the brink of failure in its five-year quest to explore the Red Planet. The Nozomi orbiter is one of four spacecraft that are due to converge on Mars in the next two months. The other three probes -- the European Space Agency's Mars Express and NASA's two Mars Exploration Rovers -- are still on track and in good working order, according to the latest status reports. Mars Express is due to enter Martian orbit on Christmas Day and send a British-built Beagle 2 lander to the surface, while the NASA rovers should arrive on Jan. 3 and Jan. 24."

Comments

Re:Conspiracy theory anyone?

[mikerich]

Maybe I listen to Art Bell too much, but it seems pretty strange that so many probes to Mars have failed in some fashion. Perhaps the Martians don't want us messing up their planet?

Or maybe Mars is a long way away and it's really hard to build a machine that can be expected to work for months on end whilst being baked and simultaneously frozen after being placed in a vacuum and bombarded with radiation. Then to put this complicated device on top of hundreds of tonnes of high explosive so that you can get it moving fifteen times faster than a rifle bullet with the objective of placing it somewhere near a body only slightly larger than the Moon?

Best wishes,
Mike.

Probe Redundancy

[MonkeyCookie]

At least there's quite a bit of redundancy with the martian probes. With four going there at once it's quite likely that at least one of them will get there.

The martian probe success rate is so bad that maybe space agencies should launch multiple smaller ones with the expectancy that some will fail to reach their destination than put all their hopes on one larger probe.

Re:Real contamination risk would be small

[kippy]

Yeah, I raised my eyebrow when I read that too. What I thought was funny was how they mentioned Mars Express is due to enter Martian orbit on Christmas Day and send a British-built Beagle 2 lander to the surface, while the NASA rovers should arrive on Jan. 3 and Jan. 24

So they are worried about a man made meteor seeding the planet but sending rovers to the surface is somehow alright???

hey, if we do "contaminate" the surface, that will save genetic engineers a lot of trouble if we ever try to terraform. "space quarantine treaty", now there's a treaty we've got to get rid of.

Contamination risk would be real

[Spamalamadingdong]

I don't suppose you've heard of common earth organisms like Deinococcus Radiourans? This bug has such potent DNA-repair mechanisms that it survives very heavy irradiation (it apparently evolved them to recover from DNA damage during long periods of dryness, but they work for radiation-induced breakages too). And substantial parts of a spacecraft survive even an uncontrolled atmospheric entry; look at how much of Columbia came down, including large pieces of astronauts.

If someone sterilized the bird with something like chlorine monoxide it's a different matter, but I've seen nothing about this and an orbiter wouldn't normally need to be sterilized like a lander. That's why Galileo met its fiery end.

Re:Real contamination risk would be small

[jdray]

I think the "contamination" they don't want is typically referred to (terrestrially) as "litter." I understand that (thanks quite a bit to the Russian program, but also to "just leave it here" Americans) the moon is quite littered with a bunch of junk that either didn't work or doesn't any more. Biocontaminant or not, trying to do geologic science and having to move aside slagged lander parts that drilled into Tharsis to do it would be a little annoying...

solution to contamination?

[igny]

There is no solution short of leaving Mars alone. Surely all probes crashed on Mars may have brought bacteria stubborn enough to survive preflight cleaning, the space flight and the entry. They may or may not thrive in future and have some long term effects. If anything, exposure to vacuum and solar flares may only aggravate situation forcing bacteria to mutate.

But do we need any solution? After all, any manned expedition will surely affect Mars more than any probe before. Exploring Mars and fear of contamination are contradictory. There is a saying in Russia, if you are affraid of wolves, then dont explore the forest, meaning that if you want to explore something, you have to overcome your trivial fears.

Re:YOU POMPOUS ASS

[Un pobre guey]

A rare eloquence, a marvelous economy of words; concise, yet expressive; direct, accessible language equally meaningful to the sage and to the barbarian. Moronic, perhaps, yet clear and precise.

Moderators suck.

[SharpFang]

Now what does THIS mean?
At one time parent post (the one +5 now) was "0, Troll". It would signify some of its informations are purposedly false. So I asked if someone could point out what is false - if anything is, because I would like to know whether I can depend on that info or just someone who shouldn't, became a moderator. And now I still don't know whether that post is true or false, only that some people here definitely feel bad about investigating the truth and are ready to waste their mod points in order to prevent revealing it.