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. today before experiencing a hardware component failure, and crashing back to the ground, according to NASA officials.

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.

"What we learn from these tests will help us build the best possible system in the future," NASA said.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Here is the original post:

NASA Morpheus Lander Crashes During Test Flight