Nozomi takes five years to reach Mars, then flies past
Japan's first interplanetary probe lost the fuel to stop at Mars to a malfunctioning valve in 1998. ISAS flew it five more years anyway, then watched it coast past at 1,000 km.
On 14 December 2003 Nozomi went past Mars at a distance of about a thousand kilometres and kept going. Five days earlier, controllers at Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science had failed to get the spacecraft configured for its orbit insertion burn. What they did instead was fire the small attitude thrusters to push the flyby further out — not to salvage anything, but to make sure a dead and unsterilised spacecraft did not hit the planet it had spent five years chasing.
Nozomi, "hope", had launched as Planet-B on 3 July 1998 on an M-V rocket from the Kagoshima Space Center at Uchinoura. It was Japan's first interplanetary spacecraft, and the first mission sent to Mars by any country other than the United States and the Soviet Union. It weighed 540 kilograms fuelled and carried fourteen instruments in a combined 33 kilograms — magnetometer, ion and electron spectrometers, a dust counter, a sounder, an imaging camera — aimed almost entirely at one question: how the solar wind strips the upper atmosphere off a planet with no global magnetic field to shield it. One instrument, a thermal plasma analyser, was Canada's first hardware on a mission beyond Earth orbit.
The break came six months in. Nozomi looped out to the Moon twice for gravity assists, then made a powered swingby of Earth on 20 December 1998. A valve in the propulsion system malfunctioned, the burn underperformed, and two correction manoeuvres the following day spent propellant that had been reserved for braking into Mars orbit. The October 1999 arrival was simply gone. Rather than write the spacecraft off, the team rebuilt the mission around what was left: four extra years looping through interplanetary space, two more Earth flybys in December 2002 and on 19 June 2003, and a slow arrival at Mars at the end of 2003.
Then the Sun intervened. On 21 April 2002, inbound for the Earth encounters, powerful solar flares damaged Nozomi's communications and power systems. A short in the cell that ran the attitude-control heaters let the hydrazine freeze solid. Contact was lost that May before a beacon was reacquired, and the fuel eventually thawed, but from then on the mission was flown through a crippled radio and a spacecraft that could not reliably point itself.
That is what failed in December 2003. ISAS formally ended the mission on the 31st. Nozomi returned real interplanetary data on its long detour — dust counts, Lyman-alpha measurements, pictures of the Earth and Moon — and nothing at all from Mars. When India's Mangalyaan reached Martian orbit on its first attempt in 2014, the list of nations that had failed at least once already had Japan on it.