Next Stop Mars (Maybe)
May 14, 2008
A friend of mine once shared his secret to success: Promise less, deliver more. Apparently the folks in charge of NASA’s upcoming Mars mission hired the same business coach.
At a press conference this week to discuss the upcoming landing of the Phoenix probe, the head of the agency’s space science program delivered the grim news: 55 percent of the landers sent to Mars never made it. The unspoken message: Don’t hold your breath.
“This is not a trip to grandma's house," quipped NASA’s Ed Weiler. "Putting a spacecraft safely on Mars is hard and risky."
NASA’s success rate actually boosts the odds significantly, with five out of the six spacecraft slated to land on Mars actually arriving to do their jobs. Perhaps it’s a reflection of our culture that we prefer as a whole to linger on the foul-up. We seem to spend a hugely disproportionate share of resources preparing for the last disaster.
Even on Mars. Every available spacecraft in orbit has been jockeying into position to be within earshot of Phoenix as it descends to the planet’s north polar region on May 25. If the spacecraft should fail, NASA does not want to be left wondering what happened, like it was after the botched Mars Polar Lander mission in 1999.
To the best anyone has been able to determine, a software glitch shut down Polar Lander's braking rockets early. So after a journey of more than 170 million miles, instead of softly dropping to the surface, it apparently traveled the last few dozen feet at roughly 50 mph and slammed into the ground.
I’m not sure NASA is going to get too many kudos, however, if things mess up this time around and engineers can generate pictures to prove it.
My bad. Missed one of the Viking twins. Actually NASA's attempted six landings on Mars and succeeded in five of them. Thanks for catching the oversight David Portree, host of this week's Carnival of Space, a weekly round-up of space news in the blogosphere. David's website is Altair VI, http://altairvi.blogspot.com/2008/05/carnival-of-space-54.html
Posted by: Irene | May 15, 2008 at 08:01 PM