As NASA’s Phoenix lander barrels toward a Memorial Day weekend landing at the Martian north pole, the Red Planet is once again morphing from the subject of endless fascination into something far more sinister.
Yes, the old death planet label is being trotted out again to describe the difficulty of sending anything to Mars. NASA officials are talking up the seven minutes of “terror” the spacecraft will endure on May 25 as it enters the atmosphere and attempts a soft landing.
Perhaps these labels are appropriate for a rust-colored planet named after the Roman god of war where a number of spacecraft have indeed vanished. The Galactic Ghoul, as NASA has dubbed it, may be eagerly awaiting Phoenix’s arrival, ready to smash the lander into a thousand pieces on Mars’ perpetually frozen surface.
Or maybe not.
The Independent has an interesting analysis of Mars exploration to date. By its reckoning, 40 missions have been launched at the Red Planet, 24 of which have failed completely or partially. So, a failure rate of 60 percent certainly sounds bad. But, when you break down the numbers, a more nuanced story emerges.
Let’s start with NASA, which has launched 20 missions to the Red Planet, losing 6 of them. That’s a 70 percent success rate which, given the difficulty involved, is pretty darned good. Especially when you consider that record includes placing three rovers and two landers on a frozen surface. In fact, NASA is 5-1 when it comes to landing things on the planet. That’s an 83.33 percent success rate.
The American Mars effort reached a low point in 1999, when it lost an orbiter and lander built as part of the rushed, underfunded “faster better cheaper” effort. Most of the other failures date back to the early days of the space program, when NASA was often lucky to get something off the ground. But, there was redundancy back then; although Mariner 8 ended up on the bottom of the Atlantic in 1971, its twin Mariner 9 orbiter was a complete success.
Mariner 9 paved the way for a far more ambitious project, Viking, which placed two sophisticated science laboratories on the surface and two spacecraft in orbit in 1976. All four vehicles survived for years; the last one went silent five years after it touched down. This has been typical of NASA probes to Mars: when they do get there successfully, they usually perform near perfectly and far outlast their original design lives. In fact, NASA often has trouble finding money to maintain operations in lieu of building new spacecraft. That’s a good problem to have.
Europe has an even better record at Mars than NASA, at least percentage wise. Its lone attempt to explore the planet, Mars Express, is now in orbit, imaging the surface in unprecedented detail. Although the small, British-built Beagle lander that Mars Express carried was lost on the surface, the mission has been a spectacular success.
Meanwhile, Japan is 0-1 in Mars exploration after its Nozomi orbiter suffered a short circuit. A disappointing result but not uncommon when you’re doing something difficult for the first time.
Which brings us to the Soviet-Russian program, which is probably where Mars gets its death planet reputation. They launched almost as many spacecraft as the Americans (18), but only two of them were even partial successes. And one of those includes the Mars 3 lander that failed 20 seconds after it became the first spacecraft to successfully reach the surface.
The Soviet-Russian Mars program has more failures at Mars than the Americans have had successes. These missions account for 40 percent of all failed attempts at exploring at the Red Planet. Oddly enough, their missteps at Mars were the complete opposite of their work at Venus, an arguably more hostile environment where they enjoyed tremendous success. Their robotic exploration of the moon was quite successful as well.
So, when you look at the stats, exploring Mars doesn’t look quite as difficult as it first seems. The planet’s bad-ass reputation really derives not from ghouls but from poor engineering in one program. Or to think of it another way, consider how the lowly Los Angeles Clippers bring down the overall record of sports teams in a city that also boasts the Lakers, Trojans, Bruins, Dodgers and Galaxy.
Which brings us back to Phoenix, a spacecraft that rose out of the ashes of the failed 1999 Mars Polar Lander and a canceled follow-up spacecraft. Phoenix was much better tested and funded than its doomed predecessor, and it has been performing nearly flawlessly thus far. The big test, of course, will come on Sunday.
Will it land successfully? The odds are actually pretty good. But there are no guarantees. Either way, I hope we can retire the Galactic Ghoul once and for all. Like the Grinch, he exists largely in people’s minds.
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