Government Executive Get the latest on need-to-know topics for federal employees delivered to your inbox. email The Simple Task That Mars Made Impossible NASA spent nearly two years trying to wrangle a probe designed to burrow into the planet’s soil. Troy Hudson didn’t want to think about Mars. It was Christmas, he had taken some time off, and this planet had enough going on at the end of 2020. But Mars was difficult to escape, he told me. It twirled in a mobile of the solar system in his home. It sat right there on his skin, tattooed on his arm, below the elbow. Hudson had spent more than a decade working on a robot that was currently parked on the surface of Mars, and NASA was about to decide whether to give up on it.