A Fatal Attraction in Space

Somewhere between Earth and Mars is a great galactic ghoul.

It is an unseen monster that gobbles up spacecraft for lunch and spits out their remains into the cold, dark void.

Over the last four decades, human beings have sent 36 spacecraft toward Mars. Twenty have ended in disaster -- explosions in Earth's stratosphere, crashes on the Martian surface, or endless spins into deep space.

It's no wonder that space scientists have nicknamed Mars the "Death Planet."

Just two weeks ago, Japan conceded the demise of its first and only mission to Mars. Nozomi, "hope" in Japanese, suffered through five years of relentless space storms, breakdowns and miscalculations without ever reaching the planet.

"Space is very unforgiving," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a Pasadena-based space exploration advocacy group. "You can do 10,000 things right, but do one thing wrong, and you are doomed."

The specter of the Death Planet now looms large as three spacecraft approach the planet over the next month. Beagle 2 -- a British lander launched by the European Space Agency -- is scheduled to touch down today. The United States is preparing to land two Mars rovers, one Jan. 3 and the next Jan. 24.

The stakes for the $800-million twin-rover gamble are enormous. They are the first major test for NASA since this year's Columbia space shuttle tragedy. The agency has been humbled by that disaster and beset by the failures of two of its last three Mars missions.

This time, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena conducted unprecedented testing for an unmanned spacecraft. Before their June and July launches, the two probes, named Spirit and Opportunity, were subjected to temperatures of minus-320 degrees Fahrenheit and lights more than twice as bright as the sun. They were bombarded with sounds loud enough to shake paint chips from test-chamber walls and rumble the ground outside like an earthquake.

Thousands of simulated landings were run on a sophisticated computer model. A third rover was driven over mock Martian terrain -- a playpen of black sand and rock in the dusty Pasadena hills. Budgets were busted to look at endless danger scenarios.

But project engineers and scientists retain their respect for a worthy adversary: the unknown.

"All kinds of statements of engineering certainty, both in this business and other businesses, have turned out to be wrong, because the devil you didn't know got you," said rover project manager Peter Theisinger.