Many missions that crashed of course. But - that can't be planned for. After all Viking 1 landed within 10 meters of a rock, "big Joe" that would have destroyed it - but it missed it, and was one of the big successes in planetary exploration.
Personally I thought that the Planetary Society mission to send radiodurans and tardigrades to Phobos and back again was rather pointless - especially since there was surely a small but finite risk it would impact on Mars.
Not too likely that the tardigrades would find somewhere to survive on Mars, or radiodurans, as both are aerobes, but still, seems a bad precedent to me, and for what purpose? What if there are habitats for aerobes on Mars that we don't know about? Only needs a microhabitat for them to survive and the surface is after all rich in perchlorates, chlorates, sulfates etc - what if there is some highly oxygenated water there as well?
And they also sent a haloarchaea too, Haloarcula Marismortui - also the thermophilic Pyrococcus furiosus - at least those were in the list of five micro-organisms in the earlier Space Shuttle experiment which did fly. The Planetary Society mission sent ten micro-organisms - I can't find a list of them however.
The block here is the Shuttle version of the LIFE experiment - see no problems with that of course, no risk of it impacting Mars.
It was actually done in partnership with Russia's Phobos Grunt.
Phobos Grunt never made it to Mars, crashed back to Earth. So it never flew to Mars.
But what was the point in the experiment?
Why send them to Mars orbit rather than just to LEO e.g. ISS?
It was supposed to test the hypothesis of panspermia - but I don't see how it did, is nothing like the conditions of a giant meteorite hitting Earth and sending debris to Mars taking perhaps a century for the first big rocks to get there - and needing to find a habitat on Mars to survive in once they get there.
I don't see how it would tell us anything more than what we can learn from experiments in the ISS or irradiating them on the Earth.
It's not going to prove or disprove panspermia or tell us anything new about what types of organisms, if any, could get to Mars or back to Earth in that way.
And the risk - though small - sending them tightly sealed in a robust container - still - I thought was unjustified.
Tough astronaut bugs to blast off for Martian moon - and . LIFE Ready to Launch on Endeavour's Last Flight - that one did fly.
The Planetary Society
Here is a long article about it by Barry DiGregorio. I don't by any means agree with all the things he says, in other articles, but in this article, I think what he says is spot on: Don't send bugs to Mars
On the plus side, then they did pass planetary protection.
Missions to Mars orbit are not required to be sterilized in the same way as missions to the surface, so the Planetary Protection officers couldn't really raise planetary protection policy objections to it - it complies with the international guidelines worked out for Mars missions.
But missions to orbit can, despite all precautions, crash on Mars notably Mars Climate Orbiter.
Phobos-Grunt Probe to Put Microbial Life in Mars Orbit
And - yes it was tested to 4,000 gs force re-entry to Earth. But - that's not the same really as landing it on Mars in event of a hard landing - would end up somewhere on the surface of Mars for indefinite future - why take even a small risk of introducing this life to Mars, for such little science gain? It's pretty obvious that some of these cosmic radiation hardy microbes would survive the journey to Phobos and back again.
As they say in the article, "Still, some space scientists are scratching their heads why anyone would risk putting Earthly microorganisms anywhere near Mars in the first place, especially given the relatively modest scientific payoff".
That's basically my attitude to their experiment :).
Now there are some lifeforms we can send to Mars - not just to the surface, also to orbit - without causing any issues. Especially, plants. NASA has an idea to send a seed to Mars that will grow in a small greenhouse to a plant. That's got no risk so long as the seed is thoroughly sterilized of microbial life (they would use a seed produced after several generations of growth of sterile seeds with no microbes) and grown only with aeroponics or hydroponics - because there is no chance at all of, e.g., a mustard plant seed growing to maturity and spreading over Mars if the mission crashes there and the capsule containing it breaks.
Apollo 17 actually I think, was far from pointless, was the most productive of all the Apollo missions. First mission with a scientist aboard. The previous ones were all basically debugging the Apollo hardware and dealing with issues that arose as in Apollo 13. You needed highly trained pilot / astronauts and the best available to deal with such risky missions. So it's understandable that they didn't send scientists on the early missions.
By the time they got to Apollo 17 at last they thought it was safe enough to send a scientist on board. But they only gave him three days on the surface, not nearly enough, you hear him constantly talking about how little time he has for his "field trip" on the Moon.
They could have sent follow up science expeditions after that - for a week or more at a time also - but they never happened.
So - basically all we have from the Moon are rocks returned by jet fighter / astronaut pilots with a few geology field trips experience, assisted by scientists on the ground who couldn't see what they saw clearly with the low resolution video - and one three day field trip by a single trained geologist with a non geologist assistant, and encumbered by spacesuits of course, limited mobility and flexibility. That's it.
Imagine if e.g. all we knew about Antarctica was what you can see of it from satellites - plus one field expedition by a single geologist with a non geological assistant, in spacesuits, who landed at a single spot on the continent and explored a few kms around that spot for a period of 3 days? We wouldn't have a thorough understanding of Antarctica from that expedition.
It's astonishing really how little we still know about the Moon when it is so accessible from the Earth. I can understand the fascination of Mars, and don't at all suggest we should stop exploring Mars. But missions to the Moon could be launched at any time, and at far less cost than Mars, why don't we do occasional lunar landing missions as well? Don't need to send humans there nowadays. Robots would do fine. A modern Curiosity to the Moon - wouldn't need all that 7 minutes of terror, would be a simple mission compared with the Mars one, easy landing, and with easy communication from Earth, it could travel kilometers in a day, like the lunakhod. With modern equipment it could totally revolutionize our understanding of the Moon for little cost compared with e.g. the manned missions to the ISS that we do over and over, same things over and over again.
Especially, we know almost nothing about the lunar caves (except that they exist and probably are lava tubes), and the permanently shadowed regions at the lunar poles, which might well trap ice from comets possibly dating back to the early solar system.
And once we can search the Moon throughly, including maybe digging below the surface - there's a possibility of meteorite fragments with debris from early Earth with organics even, fragments of ancient life, and fossils, even dating back to the earliest few hundred million years - on Earth all we have from that time are a few zircons that preserve traces of the ancient atmosphere .
And - I'm not a lunar scientist, but they have many unanswered questions. And - who knows what else also that we might discover? The lunar ice was a fairly recent discovery, what if there are other things we don't know about the Moon? There almost certainly are
See or instance, 3 Unanswered Questions About Our Moon
I think hard to come up with an example of a pointless mission to the Moon.
Can't think of many other pointless missions at all actually.
Well - except - the Chinese mission when they deliberately blew up a satellite. That was not only pointless, but greatly added to the amount of debris in Low Earth Orbit. 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test
The US did many ASAT experiments also back in the 60s, 70s and one test in the 80s, and Russians did ASAT tests also, similarly pointless in my view. Space debris
BUGS TO MARS ORBIT - POINTLESS AND RISKING PLANETARY PROTECITON
Personally I thought that the Planetary Society mission to send radiodurans and tardigrades to Phobos and back again was rather pointless - especially since there was surely a small but finite risk it would impact on Mars.
Not too likely that the tardigrades would find somewhere to survive on Mars, or radiodurans, as both are aerobes, but still, seems a bad precedent to me, and for what purpose? What if there are habitats for aerobes on Mars that we don't know about? Only needs a microhabitat for them to survive and the surface is after all rich in perchlorates, chlorates, sulfates etc - what if there is some highly oxygenated water there as well?
And they also sent a haloarchaea too, Haloarcula Marismortui - also the thermophilic Pyrococcus furiosus - at least those were in the list of five micro-organisms in the earlier Space Shuttle experiment which did fly. The Planetary Society mission sent ten micro-organisms - I can't find a list of them however.
It was actually done in partnership with Russia's Phobos Grunt.
Phobos Grunt never made it to Mars, crashed back to Earth. So it never flew to Mars.
But what was the point in the experiment?
Why send them to Mars orbit rather than just to LEO e.g. ISS?
It was supposed to test the hypothesis of panspermia - but I don't see how it did, is nothing like the conditions of a giant meteorite hitting Earth and sending debris to Mars taking perhaps a century for the first big rocks to get there - and needing to find a habitat on Mars to survive in once they get there.
I don't see how it would tell us anything more than what we can learn from experiments in the ISS or irradiating them on the Earth.
It's not going to prove or disprove panspermia or tell us anything new about what types of organisms, if any, could get to Mars or back to Earth in that way.
And the risk - though small - sending them tightly sealed in a robust container - still - I thought was unjustified.
Tough astronaut bugs to blast off for Martian moon - and . LIFE Ready to Launch on Endeavour's Last Flight - that one did fly.
The Planetary Society
Here is a long article about it by Barry DiGregorio. I don't by any means agree with all the things he says, in other articles, but in this article, I think what he says is spot on: Don't send bugs to Mars
On the plus side, then they did pass planetary protection.
Missions to Mars orbit are not required to be sterilized in the same way as missions to the surface, so the Planetary Protection officers couldn't really raise planetary protection policy objections to it - it complies with the international guidelines worked out for Mars missions.
But missions to orbit can, despite all precautions, crash on Mars notably Mars Climate Orbiter.
Phobos-Grunt Probe to Put Microbial Life in Mars Orbit
And - yes it was tested to 4,000 gs force re-entry to Earth. But - that's not the same really as landing it on Mars in event of a hard landing - would end up somewhere on the surface of Mars for indefinite future - why take even a small risk of introducing this life to Mars, for such little science gain? It's pretty obvious that some of these cosmic radiation hardy microbes would survive the journey to Phobos and back again.
As they say in the article, "Still, some space scientists are scratching their heads why anyone would risk putting Earthly microorganisms anywhere near Mars in the first place, especially given the relatively modest scientific payoff".
That's basically my attitude to their experiment :).
Now there are some lifeforms we can send to Mars - not just to the surface, also to orbit - without causing any issues. Especially, plants. NASA has an idea to send a seed to Mars that will grow in a small greenhouse to a plant. That's got no risk so long as the seed is thoroughly sterilized of microbial life (they would use a seed produced after several generations of growth of sterile seeds with no microbes) and grown only with aeroponics or hydroponics - because there is no chance at all of, e.g., a mustard plant seed growing to maturity and spreading over Mars if the mission crashes there and the capsule containing it breaks.
APOLLO 17 - FAR FROM POINTLESS
Apollo 17 actually I think, was far from pointless, was the most productive of all the Apollo missions. First mission with a scientist aboard. The previous ones were all basically debugging the Apollo hardware and dealing with issues that arose as in Apollo 13. You needed highly trained pilot / astronauts and the best available to deal with such risky missions. So it's understandable that they didn't send scientists on the early missions.
By the time they got to Apollo 17 at last they thought it was safe enough to send a scientist on board. But they only gave him three days on the surface, not nearly enough, you hear him constantly talking about how little time he has for his "field trip" on the Moon.
They could have sent follow up science expeditions after that - for a week or more at a time also - but they never happened.
So - basically all we have from the Moon are rocks returned by jet fighter / astronaut pilots with a few geology field trips experience, assisted by scientists on the ground who couldn't see what they saw clearly with the low resolution video - and one three day field trip by a single trained geologist with a non geologist assistant, and encumbered by spacesuits of course, limited mobility and flexibility. That's it.
Imagine if e.g. all we knew about Antarctica was what you can see of it from satellites - plus one field expedition by a single geologist with a non geological assistant, in spacesuits, who landed at a single spot on the continent and explored a few kms around that spot for a period of 3 days? We wouldn't have a thorough understanding of Antarctica from that expedition.
It's astonishing really how little we still know about the Moon when it is so accessible from the Earth. I can understand the fascination of Mars, and don't at all suggest we should stop exploring Mars. But missions to the Moon could be launched at any time, and at far less cost than Mars, why don't we do occasional lunar landing missions as well? Don't need to send humans there nowadays. Robots would do fine. A modern Curiosity to the Moon - wouldn't need all that 7 minutes of terror, would be a simple mission compared with the Mars one, easy landing, and with easy communication from Earth, it could travel kilometers in a day, like the lunakhod. With modern equipment it could totally revolutionize our understanding of the Moon for little cost compared with e.g. the manned missions to the ISS that we do over and over, same things over and over again.
Especially, we know almost nothing about the lunar caves (except that they exist and probably are lava tubes), and the permanently shadowed regions at the lunar poles, which might well trap ice from comets possibly dating back to the early solar system.
And once we can search the Moon throughly, including maybe digging below the surface - there's a possibility of meteorite fragments with debris from early Earth with organics even, fragments of ancient life, and fossils, even dating back to the earliest few hundred million years - on Earth all we have from that time are a few zircons that preserve traces of the ancient atmosphere .
And - I'm not a lunar scientist, but they have many unanswered questions. And - who knows what else also that we might discover? The lunar ice was a fairly recent discovery, what if there are other things we don't know about the Moon? There almost certainly are
See or instance, 3 Unanswered Questions About Our Moon
I think hard to come up with an example of a pointless mission to the Moon.
Can't think of many other pointless missions at all actually.
ASAT EXPERIMENTS - NOT JUST POINTLESS - HAZARDOUS TO OTHER SPACE MISSIONS
Well - except - the Chinese mission when they deliberately blew up a satellite. That was not only pointless, but greatly added to the amount of debris in Low Earth Orbit. 2007 Chinese anti-satellite missile test
The US did many ASAT experiments also back in the 60s, 70s and one test in the 80s, and Russians did ASAT tests also, similarly pointless in my view. Space debris
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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