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Just out of curiosity, as english is not my 1st language: does "Russia’s Failed Mars Probe" sounds a bit weird to anyone else? I mean I think these things are u

• Natsu 15y ago
  It doesn't sound weird to me. It's saying that the probe was a failure, not the people who built it, so it just doesn't sound that bad. Here, it just means "broken," and you can't really argue that it wasn't broken when it crashed into the ocean instead of going to Mars.
• Luc 15y ago
  It had already failed when it was still in orbit. The point of failure happened well before it crashed into the ocean.
• tikhonj 15y ago
  One thing to keep in mind is that this is part of a headline. In a headline, the goal is to convey as much important information as possible in a very constrained amount of space. Headlines have a different style from normal sentences. In this case, "failed" is really the history of the probe: well before crashing into the ocean, it had already failed; for a while it had just been slowly spiraling to its death.