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Russian Mars Probe Crashes into Pacific

The Russian Mars Probe has failed to leave earth orbit and crashed into the Pacific. The six-ton probe lifted off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur space center at 11:48 p.m. Moscow time, the Itar-Tass news agency said. Due to reach Mars on Sept. 12 next year, it encountered a problem after liftoff and was unable to leave the earth's orbit. The probe included over a ton of scientific instruments from countries around the world including the United States, and contained two dart-like penetrators designed to pierce the Martian surface.

After a hiatus of 20 years punctuated by the heartbreaking failures of the two Russian Prometheus probes and the American Mars Orbiter, planetary scientists have been hoping to resume aggressive close-up investigation of the red planet. The Russian mission was the second of three Mars launches planned in the next four weeks. The United States launched one robot voyage, the Global Surveyor, to the red planet two weeks ago. A second mission will leave on December 2. This mission, a lander, will deploy a roving robot.

There are ten American, two Russian and one Japanese Mars missions planned over the next two years.

Whitley's Comment:

Another Mars disaster, and an especially sad one because we now have only NASA to tell us what's actually going on up there. NASA has become a secrecy-obsessed bureaucracy that has gone so far as to publish internal memoranda about how to defeat the Freedom of Information Act. Recently, NASA announced a "new openness" and promised to release images of the Mars face and Cydonia area as they are transmitted back. However, images can easily be filtered to alter their appearance, and it is questionable that anything legitimate will come from this organization.