The first part of my latest article, “Planetary Orbit Insertion Failures Part I”, has been published on line in The Space Review. With a half a dozen spacecraft currently en route to various targets throughout the Solar System that are destined to enter orbit around them, I figured that this was a good opportunity to review the history of orbit insertion failures over the last forty years of planetary exploration. These include the Japanese Akatsuki and Nozomi missions which failed to enter orbit around Venus and Mars, respectively (the former of which is among the six missions currently destined to orbit their target in a rare second orbit insertion attempt), NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter, and NEAR-Shoemaker. Part II discusses Mars Observer, Phobos 1 and Mars 4 mission which had the dubious distinction of being the first planetary orbit insertion failure back in 1974. Also covered in Part II is the near-failure of Mars 3 in 1971 which was the topic of a recent post in Drew Ex Machina. Below I have included links to some on-line videos related to these missions.
Related Reading
“Planetary Orbit Insertion Failures Part I”, The Space Review, Article #2533, June 16, 2014 [Article]
“Planetary Orbit Insertion Failures Part II”, The Space Review, Article #2536, June 23, 2014 [Article]
Related Video
Here is a video of the launch of Akatsuki (also known a Planet-C or the Venus Climate Orbiter) on May 20, 2010 from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center.
Here is a short documentary on the loss of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter titled “Root Cause Analysis Case Study: Mars Climate Orbiter” by Angela Griffith of ThinkReliability of Houston, TX.
This is a video of a lecture on the lessons learned by the NEAR mission by NEAR Project Scientist, Andrew Cheng (Chief Scientist at the Space Department at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory), titled “NEAR: The First Discovery Mission”.