Japan Forced to Give Up on Its Explorer Mission to Mars

Japan abandoned its troubled mission to Mars on Tuesday after space officials failed in their final effort to put the Nozomi probe back on course to orbit the Red Planet.

The probe, Japan’s first interplanetary explorer, had been traveling for five years toward Mars and would have reached the planet next week.

But officials at JAXA, Japan’s space agency, said that Nozomi was off target and that scientists gave up trying to salvage the mission after an attempt to fire the probe’s engines failed because it was short on fuel.

Nozomi -- which means “hope” -- was to have circled Mars to determine whether the planet has a magnetic field. It also was to examine the evolving Martian atmosphere’s interaction with the solar wind -- a stream of highly charged particles coming from the sun -- and inspect the planet’s two moons.

Malfunctions during Nozomi’s journey altered its trajectory, raising concerns it might crash into -- and possibly contaminate -- the planet’s surface.