QUESTION:
What if the spacecraft doesn't land safely?

ANSWER from Cheick Diarra on November 20, 1996:
We are in the business of doing things that have not been done before. As
such our missions are designed taking into account possible failure
scenarios and we work to prevent them. But the risks are never eliminated
completely.  If something on the spacecraft doesn't work, and we fail to land 
safely, we will work to understand the failure and take steps to ensure that
it doesn't happen again in the future.

ANSWER from Pieter Kallemeyn on June 10, 1997:
We'd be very disappointed if the spacecraft breaks upon landing.  There's no way
to fix it, obviously, so we'd have to live with it. 

When a spacecraft fails to complete it's mission, the goal of the flight team is
to determine what caused the failure, and document it clearly enough so that
NASA can avoid a similar failure in the future.  NASA learns from it's own
mistakes, just like everyone else does.  This happened with Mars Observer (which
lost contact with Earth in 1993), and the lessons learned from that experience
are applied to the design of future spacecraft.