Mars Polar Lander and other disasters

Since then Nasa has been searching for the wreckage, first using images from the Mars Global Surveyor and now with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its hi-def camera.

And you can help. A campaign has been launched to track down the Lander's final resting place using these latest images.

Click here and see if you can spot it. I've failed so far, but I think I've come across Elvis driving an ice cream van. I had been staring at the photo for quite a while though.

As I've said, despite being our nearest neighbour space probes sent to Mars haven't had the best of luck.

There's been talk of the 'Mars Curse' and even a 'Galactic Ghoul' which eats up probes before they get to the red planet.

Here is a sad Weird Science Factoid history of some of the failures:

Marsnik 1, 1960: Russia's first attempt at interplanetary exploration ended in ignomy when it failed to escape the atmosphere and came down with a crunch.

Mars 1, 1962: Another Soviet mission. The probe did make a flyby past Mars, but it had stopped talking to mission control long before then.

Mariner 3: This American explorer ran out of batteries. Ooops!

Mars 2, 1971: Back to the USSR, but at least this was only a partial fiasco. The oribiter worked fine, but a lander came in too steep and then didn't bother to deploy its parachute. Ouch.

Mars 3, 1971: A bit more successful for the Ruskies. A lander sent data all the way down to the Martian surface then promptly went kaput after all of 110 seconds. It had managed to land in the middle of a dust storm.

Mars Observer, 1992: This American orbiter was doing fine until three days before then of its journey. Scientists blamed it on a fuel leak.

Mars 96, 1996: Russian Space Forces had ambitious plans for this launch. It was the heaviest interplanetary probe up to that time and featured an orbiter, surface stations and a big drill. All came tumbling back to Earth when a rocket stage failed to ignite and the craft automatically turned on its engines - when it was facing the wrong planet, ours.

Mars Climate Orbiter, 1998: And here we get to the daddy of all space probe cock-ups. This probe got too close to Mars and came apart in the atmosphere. Why? One set of scientists working on the project was working in imperial measurements and another in metric. The two don't mix and the failure cost NASA almost $330 million. Ooof!

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