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."

Re:Real contamination risk would be small

[Anonymous Coward]

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

By Jove i think you've got it! Not.

The japanese probe was never intended to touch down so was never decontaminated.

The laders were intended to reach the surface, and so were decontaminated appropriately.

Re:Reliability

[pinkboi]

Do realize that this probe already went around Mars and back to Earth. It's pretty amazing that the thing has been functioning all this time.

Re:how much do they cost?

[tarquin_fim_bim]

The European 'Mars Express' probe has a budget of 150 000 000 euros.

Re:Contamination risk would be real

[Planesdragon]

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.

Columbia was a controlled reentry; it suffered a heat-shield failure, not a tradgectory failure.

Yes and No

[rarose]

1. Orbiters are generally not sanitized to the level that landers are, so there is a higher chance of viable organisms on the Jap probe.

2. I don't know about Japanese orbital policy, but NASA policy requires that probes be launched on an orbit that will cause it to slightly miss it's target.... then when it's almost at the planet the orbital bias is removed so that orbital insertion takes place. So if this were a NASA mission there wouldn't be contaimination if the probe died... it'd just happily whizz on by into a solar orbit.

Re:the question is...

[BJH]

Not to ruin the joke, but harakiri and seppuku are exactly the same thing, just different terms for it - one colloquial and one formal.

Not to mention that page you linked to gets it entirely wrong calling the blade used a kozuka - that's a small knife a few inches long. Good luck cutting yourself open with something like that. The blade actually used is a wakizashi.

Call bullshit

[Mammothrept]

Ignore the conspiracy theory nutjobs blaming aliens for damaging the Japanese probe. There probably is something wrong (as in intentionally untrue) about this story but there is a simpler and more human explanation for it. If JAXA's version of events is correct, this is the third space vehicle they've had die recently because of solar flares. (See http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031031090646.2kxsn1 mx.html).

They lost Midori-2 and Kodama in October, both supposedly due to solar flares. According to a friend who works on the Midori program, they really don't know what went wrong. The power started fading and over the course of several hours, went from about 6Kw of power to 1Kw. If a solar flare killed Midori-2, the power should have dumped quickly. Despite not knowing why it died, they blamed solar flares. My guess is that flares got the blame because that way, it is nobody's fault. Given how unforthcoming JAXA has been about Nozumi, I would not take their explanation of Nozumi's problems at face value unless they also release credible data showing cause and effect.