NASA's Morpheus lander crashes in flames during test flight - The Sun

NASA scientists will be glad their recent mission to Mars went better than their latest effort - with a trial run ending with the craft in a burning heap.

The prototype, called Morpheus, was being tested at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, US, when it suddenly veered off to one side during take-off.

While the engines successfully lifted the 1,750lb unmanned probe into the air, something clearly went wrong, causing the craft to flip over before landing top-down in a cloud of dust.

And as the dust settled, it revealed that things were even worse than they first appeared - with the prototype engulfed into flames.

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PROJECT Morpheus ended in disaster when the small lander burst into flames on runway

NASA later tweeted: "The @MorpheusLander experienced a failure, causing it to catch fire. No one was injured. Information will be released as soon as possible."

And they later told in a statement how hardware failure had been responsible for the crash, saying: "During today's free-flight test of the Project Morpheus vehicle, it lifted off the ground and then experienced a hardware component failure, which prevented it from maintaining stable flight."

The craft is now reported to be beyond repair.

The Morpheus lander is part of a £4.4m project to develop a relatively cheap planetary lander, using an environmentally-friendly mix of methane and liquid oxygen as fuel.

While the prototype has undergone many test flights before, it has always been tethered to a line to stop it from toppling over.

The crash comes as an embarrassment for the US space agency, which recently succeeded in landing space rover Curiosity on Mars.