Canada’s first space mission to another planet — a science instrument riding on a Japanese probe heading to Mars — is likely doomed as the Nozomi spacecraft is escaping control and may miss Mars completely. Nozomi has been flying for five years and has already missed Mars once. It carries a Canadian-built instrument that would measure the gases in Mars’ thin atmosphere. Nozomi is designed to orbit Mars. But Japan acknowledges it can barely control Nozomi, and the spacecraft may crash on Mars within a few weeks, or miss the planet and drift aimlessly around the sun forever. Nozomi means "Hope," and the little spacecraft could use some. It has experienced a series of failures that kept it from reaching Mars on its first trip. Unfazed, its operators swung it around for a second pass at the Red Planet, but now say the probe is in its "final challenge" and may never arrive.
They missed an entire planet, twice.
Translation: Nozomi, and the Canadian-built Thermal Plasma Analyzer, may continue a tradition of man-made probes that don’t survive the trip to the bad-luck planet.
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