-
- Is Mars the Bermuda Triangle of the solar system? The
disappearance of the £75 million Mars Climate Orbiter has reinforced
the red planet's reputation as a spacecraft gobbler.
-
- Billions of pounds-worth of hardware bound for Mars has
either lost contact with Earth, crashed, disappeared or failed to get off
the launch pad.
-
- The last big US failure, the $980 million Mars Observer,
which went silent just three days from the planet in 1993, caused such
anguish that the US space agency Nasa changed its whole philosophy.
-
- Out went the old-fashioned, high-cost spacecraft. In
came the "cheaper, better, faster" philosophy of the head of
Nasa, Dan Goldin.
-
- Now one of his new-style 'cheapos' has gone exactly the
same way.
-
- Counting how much has been lost is impossible. Many of
the failures came from the Soviet Union at a time when nobody, not even
them, knew what they were costing.
-
- But the last three - Mars Observer and Mars Climate Orbiter
from the US, and Mars 96 from Russia - cost almost £900 million and
they are only three of 18 documented failures.
-
- The unhappiest man yesterday was Fred Taylor, of Oxford
University, who developed the radiometer on Mars Climate Orbiter which
was intended to give a detailed picture of Martian weather. The instrument
originally flew on Mars Observer, and was also lost.
-
- Nobody yet knows what scuppered Mars Climate Orbiter,
but it appears to have approached the planet too close and burned up in
the atmosphere, broken apart, or crashed.
|
