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:You may be right

[Uber Banker]

No no no! WMD is just another way of saying they have oil. No way we're going to radiate all that oil. Better we use conventional force (young redneck males enrolled in the army) to further our USA-corp greed and USA-leader's power trip.

OT semantics

[Scrameustache]

WMD is just another way of saying they have oil.

Ya know, technically, the sept11 attacks used plane fuel (a derivative of crude oil) as a weapon of mass destruction. With that insane logic, Iraq did have WMD and the facilities associated with it.

Of course, Dubbya specifically mentioned nerve gas, bio and nuclear (well, nucular, actually), so that invalidates my semantics, but still...