For a few moments today, NASA forgot about the successful landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, and focused on the Morpheus lander, which unfortunately caught fire and crashed this morning. <\/p>\n
In a tweet, NASA's Kennedy Space Center announced that the prototype experienced a failure during its first free-flight test today, but no one was hurt in the explosion. <\/p>\n
The unmanned experimental and \"green\" device barely left the launch pad around 12:40 p.m. today before experiencing a hardware component failure, and crashing back to the ground, according to NASA officials. <\/p>\n
Engineers are looking into the test data, the space center said in a statement, which explained that \"failures such as these\" were anticipated and are actually part of the development process. <\/p>\n
\"What we learn from these tests will help us build the best possible system in the future,\" NASA said. <\/p>\n
According to the agency's official Project Morpheus website, the spacecraft is a vertical test bed vehicle that demonstrates a new green propellant propulsion system, as well as autonomous landing and hazard-detection technology. <\/p>\n
\"The Morpheus Project represents not only a vehicle to advance technologies, but also an opportunity to try out 'lean development' engineering practices,\" the site said. <\/p>\n
Manufactured and assembled at NASA's Johnson Space Center, the Morpheus can carry 1,100 pounds of cargo to the moon, perhaps transporting a humanoid robot, a small rover, or a small laboratory to convert moon dust into oxygen. <\/p>\n
In advance of today's test flight, the liquid-oxygen and methane-propelled lander had been tested in a series of tether flights, contributing to the project's overall reported cost of about $7 million in the last two and a half years, according to Space.com. <\/p>\n
Previously, the SUV-sized Morpheus sparked a grass fire at the Johnson Space Center in Houston during a 2011 tethered test flight, Space.com reported. No one was hurt. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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NASA Morpheus Lander Crashes During Test Flight<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a few moments today, NASA forgot about the successful landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, and focused on the Morpheus lander, which unfortunately caught fire and crashed this morning. In a tweet, NASA's Kennedy Space Center announced that the prototype experienced a failure during its first free-flight test today, but no one was hurt in the explosion. The unmanned experimental and \"green\" device barely left the launch pad around 12:40 p.m Continue reading