T. K. Arispe

 My friend Chris Lintott and I were commenting on cute cartoon versions of spacecraft, and I mentioned I wanted to retroactively anthropomorphize past space missions, and then the ideas just started coming. Chris had the idea of encounters with the Great Galactic Ghoul, a fictional entity supposed to be responsible for the failures of spacecraft headed to Mars. The Ghoul was created by a journalist in 1969, and subsequently adopted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and even mentioned lightheartedly in some of its official documents.

Mars Polar Lander was launched in January 1999 and was supposed to have landed in December of that year. Instead, communications dropped just before cruise stage separation, and that was the last we ever heard from MPL. The mission failure was probably caused by a software error that caused the onboard computer to mistake the landing legs deploying for actual touchdown. Whoops.

I'm still a little bit sore about MPL because I'd put my name on it:

That said, the concept of sending a lander to the polar regions of Mars was later resurrected for the Phoenix mission (pun intended by the mission team), which was phenomenally successful. So all's well that ends well.

Also, I'm fairly certain this is the first time in 56 years that someone's drawn fan art of the Great Galactic Ghoul. You're welcome.