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Analysis shows that whatwent wrong withMars probeswas always been back on Earthin the minds and management styles of the space team, not Mars itself. The root of thepast Mars failuresbear a striking resemblance to the flawed decision-making process that destroyed both Challenger and Columbia. In both cases, inadequate budgets, procedural shortcuts and wishful thinking led to disaster. This time, have the right lessons been learned, and what are the chances of success for future probes? Undeniably challenging Its undeniable that Mars does provide special challenges. Farther from the sun than Earth,Mars is colder andthe solar power is half the level Earth receives. Unexpected conditions or dangerous rock formations on the planets surface could lie in ambush. At the height of the space race, in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA launched a total of 10 vehicles to Mars including two lander/orbiter pairs. Two were lost due to launch vehicle malfunctions, but of the remaining eight, every single one of them flew successfully. Neither two-thirds of the eight that made it to Mars, nor even one-third of them, fell victim to the Death Planet. But in the 1990s it was the management shortcuts, not the challenge of Mars, nor the carelessness of individual workers, thatdoomed NASAs Mars missions. Five spacecraft were lost during the period when NASA wasled by Dan Goldin, whose faster-better-cheaper mantra demanded miracles of cost savings. Mars Observer out of contact Firstcame the ill-fated Mars Observer, launched Sept.
It was to have been the first United States spacecraft to study Mars since the hugely successful Viking missions 18 years earlier. Butthe Mars Observerfell silent just three days before entering orbit around Mars. Ayear later, an investigation board reported that the most probable cause of the loss of communication was a rupture of the spacecrafts fuel pressurization valves. They concluded that an energetically significant amount of fuel NASA jargonfor enough to blow uphad gradually leaked through check valves and accumulated in the tubing during the spacecrafts 11-monthcruise to Mars.
Two other lander probes hitchhiking on the main spacecraft also vanished. The accident board found so much wrong with their designthatthey were unable to settle on a most likely failure cause. Donna Shirley was the manager of the highly successful Mars Pathfinder landing mission in 1997, and afterward she had been asked to run the Mars Polar Lander mission. I couldnt persuade them that they were going too far with better, faster, cheaper, she said. There was no one to check and double check, and when you have complicated and complex missions you are going to make mistakes that need catching.
This is exactly what doomed another probe, the Mars Climate Orbiter, which also disappeared just as it arrived at Mars, also in 1999. NASA later released the story that the probe was lost because some low-level workers mixed up English and metric units for rocket thrust. This became a big public joke, anddeflected attention from the true cause. Blaming the foul-up in units wasa misrepresentation: To save money, NASA had deleted staffing levels to double-check work, assuming instead that all the workers would make no mistakes. And when the error led to noticeable navigational errors during the flight,the team didnt have the resources to investigate the clues. Rather than discover what was behind the worrisome indicators, they chose to assume everything was all right and the probe crashed into Mars. Anthony Spear, a retired space manager, was called on to diagnose what was going wrong.
In the words of Charles Elachi, director of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the workers have done everything humanly possible that we know about, to be able to minimize the risk and enhance our possibility of succeeding. European officials have made similar comments about learning from lessons of past mistakes. For the real lesson of Mars is that it doesnt suffer fools gladlybut it does reward diligence, truthfulness and integrity. James Oberg, space analyst for NBC News, spent 22 years at the Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer.
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