Little hope for Japan's Mars probe

Japanese space agency officials insist they have not yet lost Hope. But the fate of the country’s first interplanetary explorer - a Mars probe dubbed Nozomi, which means hope - is growing doubtful.

After a five-year journey, Nozomi is due to reach Mars on December 14 and mission managers say it is still very much alive.

But they acknowledge engine problems have put the probe on a possible crash course with the Red Planet. Though they say such a collision is highly unlikely, they are less optimistic about whether the probe will actually get into a proper orbit.

“If we can’t fix Nozomi’s problems in time, it is very likely that it won’t be able to enter Mars’ orbit,” project manager Hajime Hayakawa said. “But, at least, we can keep Nozomi from hitting Mars.”

Failure would be a serious blow to Japan’s space programme.

After China’s entry last month into the elite group of nations that have launched manned space flights - something Japan has not done - the country’s budget-strapped space agency is in need of a high-profile success.

But malfunctions during the trip have altered Nozomi’s trajectory, and it is now moving into a course that is too low. To fix that, officials at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will fire the dragonfly-shaped, 1,190-pound probe’s engines on December 9.

Firouz Naderi, manager of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told a group of international reporters that Nozomi “most probably won’t make it”.

“The obituary is not out yet but you can hardly detect a pulse now,” he said.

Hayakawa denied that, but refused to speculate on Nozomi’s chances of success.

“It is true that the Nozomi has problems,” he said. “At this point, we don’t know the percentage of its chance of successfully entering into a Mars orbit.”

He stressed, however, that his team was doing all it could to see that Nozomi gets fixed.

Nozomi is to circle Mars at an average altitude of about 550 miles, collecting samples and measuring the composition of the atmosphere. Over two years, it will try to determine whether Mars has a magnetic field by studying electric fields in the ionosphere, part of the atmosphere where free electrons, or ions, exist.

It will also examine the evolving Martian atmosphere’s interaction with the solar wind - a stream of highly charged particles coming from the sun - and offer a close-up examination of the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos.