As we proceed further into the Halloween season, a long dormant specter has unexpectedly emerged from the past to claim another victim. In the early era of space exploration a shockingly high number of Mars missions were complete failures. This led space agencies to talk about the “Galactic Ghoul” a malevolent (and wholly imaginary!) entity which devours Mars probes. Well, actually the phrase “Galactic Ghoul” was coined in the nineties…before that, this high failure rate was attributed to “the Curse of Mars” which isn’t quite as vivid a personification of failure but which still effectively evokes a malevolent supernatural thing out in the darkness between worlds. The ghoul (or curse) was particularly hard on Soviet craft and a shockingly large number of Soviet missions just vanished into the void for no reason as detailed in this dramatic chart (which is worth looking at for all sorts of reasons).
The curse even manifested in the late nineties when NASA screwed up the distinction between matric and non-metric units of measurement and fired the Mars Climate Orbiter straight into the Martian atmosphere where it disintegrated (although that seems like it could be chalked up to a different old nemesis: being bad at math). At any rate, the ghoul has been quiescent for a while as NASA learned to operate on the red planet (and triple check their numbers).
Today though brings more grim news from the Red Planet. The ESA and the Russian space agency collaborated on ExoMars a joint mission in which the two teams sent an orbiter and a lander to Mars together. The Trace Gas Orbiter is the real scientific component of the mission. It will assay Mars for methane sources (we would like to know where the atmospheric methane of Mars comes from since it should be scrubbed from the thin Martian atmosphere faster than it can build up). The lander was named for Giovanni Schiaparelli, the 19th-century Italian astronomer who popularized the idea of Martian canals (a concept long since disproven but bearing elements of truth).
Schiaparelli’s only scientific payload was a small weather station that would have run for a few days before running out of batteries. It was really a lander designed to test out Martian landing capabilities, however, as of press time, the lander had proceeded into the Martian gravity well and then went ominously and completely silent. Is the galactic ghoul now sated or will it need to feed on the next charismatic lander headed to the red planet? Elon Musk may want to do some animal sacrifice and appeasement dances before he launches his colony ship!
ferrebeekeeper 
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 20, 2016 at 3:43 AM
Marc Winger
Musk talks big & his funding comes from the government which would do its own big deal if it ever comes down to a reality check. With politics a swirling, I’ve not kept up on the latest scientific projects. So thanks for pointing this out about the ESA & Moscow venture. It is a bit spooky, the vessels that have been lost to Mars. One notes that landings & takeoffs from our own planet are spotty, at best. The instincts of our own people being a saving grace a great deal of the time. With no instincts of the Martian gravity well, I’ve never been surprised at the numerous failures. Just my opinion, though.
November 4, 2016 at 3:13 PM
Wayne
Well NASA at least seems to finally be getting the hang of Martian landings. Maybe they can share their hard-won ideas with future Martian explorers.
I am so happy that a charismatic billionaire is working on monetizing space exploration that I don’t feel like poking holes in Musk’s daft space plans, his house-of-cards finances, or his luxury cars.
November 4, 2016 at 5:02 PM
Marc Winger
I hear you. However; only a government has the infrastructure, finances & total wherewithal for actual space exploration. The current administration pulled back most of the funding & NASA has been exploring on the cheap ever since. Unmanned robots are one thing, actually building a program that puts men back into space including all the folderol that goes with that is another. But we’re giving up the Space Station, instead of keeping & retooling it after the Russians pull out, a station that could be used as a shipyard & launch point for a mothership to Mars & we currently don’t even have the capability to shuttle men out of the gravity well. I think Musk’s vision is great, but he’s never going to be put in charge of the US “space program” which is basically what he wants, since all his funding does come from the US. In the vacuum of exploration, China is stepping in. So… we’ll have to be catching up to Communist thieves, who have stolen our technology in the first place. So many dynamics.
We’ll see what happens this coming week. If we would have had a government that understood the importance of these things, we would already have a habitat waiting on Mars for our people. Instead, NASA has been tasked with important earthly matters, like Muslim outreach. Sheesh.