diff --git a/CHANGES.rst b/CHANGES.rst
index 15c4c47eb5..46761a7ced 100644
--- a/CHANGES.rst
+++ b/CHANGES.rst
@@ -48,6 +48,12 @@ esa.jwst
 
 - Add download_files_from_program method to get all products by program id [#3073]
 
+ipac.irsa
+^^^^^^^^^
+
+- Add more robust handling of errors returned in Most.query_object() responses.
+  [#3140]
+
 mpc
 ^^^
 
diff --git a/astroquery/ipac/irsa/most.py b/astroquery/ipac/irsa/most.py
index d46afb1940..ef136a10e7 100644
--- a/astroquery/ipac/irsa/most.py
+++ b/astroquery/ipac/irsa/most.py
@@ -189,6 +189,11 @@ def _parse_full_regular_response(self, response, withTarballs=False):
         html = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html5lib")
         download_tags = html.find_all("a", string=re.compile(".*Download.*"))
 
+        # If for some reason this wasn't a full response with downloadable tags,
+        # raise an explicit exception:
+        if not download_tags:
+            raise ValueError('Something has gone wrong, there are no results parsed. '
+                             f'For full response see: {response.text}')
         # this is "Download Results Table (above)"
         results_response = self._request("GET", download_tags[0]["href"])
         retdict["results"] = Table.read(results_response.text, format="ipac")
@@ -532,7 +537,7 @@ def query_object(self, catalog="wise_merge", input_mode="name_input", output_mod
 
         # MOST will not raise an bad response if the query is bad because they
         # are not a REST API
-        if "MOST: *** error:" in response.text:
+        if "MOST: *** error:" in response.text or "most: error:" in response.text:
             raise InvalidQueryError(response.text)
 
         # presume that response is HTML to simplify conditions