re: Sad news
While Nozomi will avoid Mars, nobody talks about it crashing some day, in the future. It could happen. Same thing for Mars Observer. I think it was thought to have ruptured a fuel line or even exploded. Mars Observer too might crash into Mars in the future.
And there's a Soviet Mars mission that did land, even more than one and I'm not sure how sterilized they had been, prior to launch.
Well, it's true the Japanese space agencies have suffered a number of setbacks and what's worrysome is that they're unrelated, so more difficult to pinpoint their causes.
Raoul