Experts are growing anxious that Japan’s beleaguered space probe Nozomi may contaminate Mars if it happens to collide with the Red Planet, possibly on Dec. 14. They say there is a roughly 1 percent possibility that the Nozomi, Japan’s first orbiter of Mars, will impact the planet due to malfunctions with its electrical system and numerous other factors.
November 27th, 2003
Japanese probe may miss Mars CBC News
Technical difficulties may prevent a Japanese probe carrying a Canadian instrument from reaching Mars. This is Canada’s first chance to go to another planet but the spacecraft was damaged on its way to Mars. Japan’s ill-fated Nozomi spacecraft left for Mars five years ago. The journey normally takes six months. Nozomi is the first of four probes expected to arrive at Mars over the next two months.
November 25th, 2003
Canada’s Nozomi spacecraft may miss its target — Mars canada.com
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.
November 21st, 2003
Japan admits its Mars probe is failing
After months of silence and a week of hopeful half-truths, Japanese space officials have finally confirmed that their Mars-bound Nozomi probe is teetering on the brink of failure in its five-year quest to explore the Red Planet.
November 20th, 2003
Status of Japan’s Mars Explorer “NOZOMI” JAXA
Some of you might have read a report of a newspaper; “NOZOMI, Japanese made Mars exploration probe is to collide with Mars”. But this description is not correct. The truth is that “NOZOMI” will, if going as it is, approach Mars on December 14 by 894km passing above Martian surface at its closest approach, but there would not be excluded a theoretical possibility of colliding with Mars by more or less one percent, if we take the error of orbit determination into account.
November 19th, 2003
Little hope for Japan’s Mars probe Ireland On-Line
Japanese space agency officials insist they have not yet lost Hope. But the fate of the country
November 15th, 2003
Hoping to Avoid Contamination, Japan Attempts to Fix Mars Probe
Japan’s space agency, hoping to prevent its first interplanetary probe from crashing into Mars, is scrambling to fix an on-board glitch before the spacecraft reaches the planet next month, an agency official said Friday. Launched in 1998, the Nozomi orbiter was sent to study the upper atmosphere of Mars but has been plagued with problems, which persist despite repeated attempts to correct them.
November 14th, 2003
Nozomi on Course — Not to Hit Mars The Planetary Society
News reports that Nozomi — Japan’s first mission to another planet — is on course to crash into Mars have been exaggerated. The probability of Japan’s first Mars mission hitting the Red Planet even without the planned trajectory corrections, which are standard operating procedures on all missions, is 1%, according to Hajime Hayakawa, of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).