updated 5-6-05

Mars Lander

STATISTICS MARS

• Mean Radius: 3388.0 km

• Mass: 0.108 (Earth=1)

• Density: 3.94 (gm/cm)

• Gravity: 0.380 (Earth=1)

• Orbit Period: 686.98 (Earth days)

• Rotation Period: 1.026 (Earth days)

• Semimajor Axis of Orbit: 1.524 au

• Eccentricity of Orbit: 0.093

MARS

Updated: 5-6-2005 - 08:33 AM EDT

Scientist Spots What May Be Missing Mars Polar Lander

NASA Craft Vanished During a Landing Attempt on Red Planet Six Years Ago

By ALICIA CHANG, AP

A NASA image may show the craft's parachute. A white dot labeled MPL a few hundred yards away could be the lander.

LOS ANGELES (May 6) - Nearly six years after NASA's Mars Polar Lander vanished during a landing attempt on the Red Planet, a scientist said he has spotted what appears to be wreckage of the spacecraft.

The observation came during a re-examination of grainy, black-and-white images taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor, which searched for the probe with no success in 1999 and 2000.

''The observation of a single, small dot at the center of the disturbed location suggests that the vehicle remained more or less intact after its fall,'' wrote Michael Malin, president and chief scientist of San Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems, which operates the camera aboard Global Surveyor.

Malin makes his case in the July issue of Sky & Telescope magazine. A copy of his article was posted Thursday on the magazine's Web site.

Global Surveyor will take higher resolution images later this year in an attempt to confirm the missing lander's location.

''It looks intriguing,'' said Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for NASA's Mars Program. He said the images show just one possible location of the missing Polar Lander and more images are needed.

The $165 million Polar Lander was headed for touchdown near Mars' south pole on Dec. 3, 1999, when contact was lost. A NASA team concluded a rocket engine shut off prematurely, causing the spacecraft to plummet about 130 feet to almost certain destruction.

A re-examination of images of the surface of Mars taken after the Polar Lander's disappearance show a distinct white patch that could be a parachute. A few hundred meters away, scientists noted a dark area, possibly made from rocket blast marks, with a tiny white dot in the center that could be the lander.

The images pinpointing Polar Lander's possible location jibes with NASA's theory of the spacecraft's demise, Malin said.

Scientists at his firm decided to review the old Polar Lander images after last year's successful landings of the twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. The rovers used a combination of rockets, parachutes and air bags to cushion their landing.

The Polar Lander used a similar system during its unsuccessful approach.

Its disappearance was a blow to NASA, which had lost the lander's $125 million sibling spacecraft, the Mars Climate Orbiter, three months earlier. That spacecraft apparently burned up as it was about to enter orbit.

The lander and orbiter were designed to study and analyze Mars' atmosphere and search for signs of frozen water beneath its south pole.

05/06/05 07:56EDT

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

3-21-01 -
EXCLUSIVE: Spy Agency May Have Located Mars Polar Lander
By Leonard David Senior Space Writer
Mars Mishaps: What Went Wrong?
NASA Poised to Give Up Listening for Mars Polar Lander
Key Scientist Says Mars Polar Lander May Be Alive
Missions to Mars: NASA Plans a Bigger Booster
Overhead schematic of the Mars Polar Lander.
WASHINGTON – The Mars Polar Lander may have been found -- intact -- by a top-secret spy imagery agency.
The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) has been quietly scanning Mars pictures, looking for the Mars Polar Lander since early December 1999. According to a source close to the NIMA effort, photographic specialists at NIMA think they’ve spotted something. But NASA officials say it’s too early to tell.
The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) dove into the Martian atmosphere on Dec. 3, 1999, heading for a soft landing on the planet's south polar region. But contact was never reestablished after the probe was to have touched down. On Jan. 17, 2000, after a series of efforts to communicate with the spacecraft failed, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who managed the mission, declared it a loss.
NASA contacted NIMA within a few weeks of the lander's failure, said Edward Weiler, head of NASA’s Office of Space Science.
NIMA on patrol
NIMA is a combat support agency of the Department of Defense. The agency has a global mission and unique responsibilities to manage and provide imagery and geo-spatial information to national policymakers and military forces.
A world-class leader in imagery intelligence, NIMA routinely supports the operations of top-secret U.S. national security spacecraft. They employ specialists in maximizing information that can be gleaned from surveillance photography.
"Shortly after the loss of Mars Polar Lander, NIMA and NASA began working together analyzing images of the intended landing site and to try to locate the spacecraft," said Jennifer Lafley, a NIMA spokeswoman.
"At this point, the results of this study are not conclusive, and the agencies are working together on resolving a number of technical questions," Lafley said.
On the surface
According to a SPACE.com source familiar with the search underway, euphoric NIMA experts believe they have identified the Mars Polar Lander. Furthermore, the source said that the lander appears intact on the surface, sitting atop its trio of landing legs. If so, that finding calls to question a failure review board that cited a software glitch and inadequate testing procedures as a likely cause for the probe to smack into Mars’ surface at high speed.
In the past, searches of images relayed by Mars Global Surveyor – still operating around the Red Planet – failed to find the craft itself, its reentry aeroshell, or the vehicle’s parachute.
"If found intact, it would mean that we would have to reexamine our most probable cause of failure," said Noel Hinners, on special assignment for Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado. The aerospace firm built the Mars Polar Lander for NASA.
While not aware of any spotting of the lander by NIMA teams, Hinners said finding the lander perched on the Martian terrain would be welcome news. It would certainly call into question whether the right probable cause was identified as to why Mars Polar Lander disappeared, he said.
"It would also tell me that the 2001 lander that we built and have at the company is perfectly good. We think that anyway…so why not use that asset?" Hinners told SPACE.com. "If it should turn up someplace, we need to go back and make sure that the communications systems and the reconnaissance are such that we can find things better than we did this time around," he said.
Too early to tell
Weiler said it’s too soon to declare any victory about finding the Mars Polar Lander.
"It’s no big secret. They have a lot of expertise in analyzing imagery. They said they would be willing to put some of their best people to spend some spare time on a fun project. They wanted to see if they could pull an image ‘out of the grass,’ so to speak, of looking at Mars Global Surveyor data to search for the Mars Polar Lander," Weiler told SPACE.com.
Weiler said NIMA experts have been searching for the probe for some 14 to 15 months. "They’ve got some initial data. We’ve looked at it and we’ve agreed there’s some technical issues on whether there’s anything there or not," he said.
"We are a couple to several months away from resolving each other's questions and coming to a joint conclusion. We will do this together -- NIMA and NASA," Weiler said.
"If anybody is saying that they have definitively proved to [the] 99 percentile that Mars Polar Lander has or hasn’t been found, they are overstating the situation grossly," Weiler said.
Lafley of NIMA said that when the agencies arrive at firm conclusions, they would make a joint announcement. "In any event, additional images of the intended MPL landing site will be acquired using the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter later this year," she said.
©2001 SPACE.com, inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ENGINE CUTOFF DOOMED POLAR LANDER

NASA's Mars Polar Lander probably failed due to a premature shutdown of its descent engine, causing the $165 million spacecraft to smash into the surface of Mars, according to new information released Tuesday.

http://www.space.com/cgi-bin/email/gate.cgi?lk=T1&date=000328&go=/science/solarsystem/mpl_report_000328.html

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NASA knew Mars Polar Lander doomed

United Press International - March 21, 2000 15:01

By James Oberg, UPI Space Writer

HOUSTON, March 21 (UPI) -- The disappearance of NASA's Mars Polar Lander last December was no surprise to space officials, UPI has learned.

Prior to its arrival at Mars, a review board had already identified a fatal design flaw with the braking thrusters that doomed the mission, but NASA withheld this conclusion from the public.

The probe was lost while attempting to land near the martian south pole on December 3. Two small microprobes which had deployed separately also were never heard from again.

It was the second expensive setback for American interplanetary exploration in less than three months. On September 23, a companion probe had been destroyed when a navigation error sent it skimming too deeply into the atmosphere of Mars.

Following these failures, NASA commissioned several expert panels to review the accidents and recommend improvements in NASA procedures.

A source close to the panel probing the second accident has told UPI that its conclusions are "devastating" to NASA's reputation. Unlike the previous accident, where management errors merely prevented the recognition of other human errors, in this case it was a management misjudgment which caused the fatal flaw in the first place.

"I'm as certain as I can be that the thing blew up," the source concluded.

As explained privately to UPI, the Mars Polar Lander vehicle's braking thrusters had failed acceptance testing during its construction. But rather than begin an expensive and time-consuming redesign, an unnamed space official simply altered the conditions of the testing until the engine passed.

"That happened in middle management," the source told UPI. "It was done unilaterally with no approval up or down the chain of command."

The Mars Polar Lander employed a bank of rocket engines which use hydrazine fuel. The fuel is passed through metal grates which cause it to decompose violently, creating the thrust used by the engines.

These metal grates are called "catalyst beds," or "cat beds." Their purpose is to initiate the explosive chemical reaction in the hydrazine.

"They tested the cat bed ignition process at a temperature much higher than it would be in flight," UPI's source said. This was done because when the cat beds were first tested at the low temperatures predicted after the long cruise from Earth to Mars, the ignition failed or was too unstable to be controlled.

So the test conditions were changed in order to certify the engine performance. But the conditions then no longer represented those most likely to occur on the real space flight.

Following the September loss of the first spacecraft due to management errors, NASA had initiated a crash review of the Mars Polar Lander to identify any similar oversights. According to UPI's source, the flaws in the cat bed testing were uncovered only a few days before the landing was to occur on December 3.

By then it was too late to do anything about it.

Garbled rumors of some temperature-related design flaw circulated in the days before the landing attempt. However, as in the September case when space officials possessed terrifying indications of imminent failure even before the arrival at Mars, NASA made no public disclosure of these expectations.

The Mars Polar Lander investigation team has also reportedly identified a second fatal design flaw that would have doomed the probe even if the engines had functioned properly.

The three landing legs of the probe contain small microswitches which are triggered when the legs touch the surface. This signal commands the engines to cease firing.

Post-accident tests have shown that when the legs are initially unfolded during the final descent, springs push them so hard that they "bounce" and trigger the microswitches by accident. As a result, the computer receives what it believes are indications of a successful touchdown, and it shuts off the engines.

Since this false signal actually occurs high in the air, the engine shutdown automatically leads to a free fall and destructive high-speed impact.

Ground testing prior to launch apparently never detected this because each of the tests was performed in isolation from other tests. One team verified that the legs unfolded properly. Another team verified that the microswitches functioned on landing.

No integrated end-to-end test was performed due to budget and time constraints. But UPI has been privately told that "this has been reproduceable on a regular basis" in post-flight tests.

Perhaps by coincidence, in a safety memo to NASA employees distributed on March 20, NASA administrator Dan Goldin stressed "the importance of adequate testing." Reliability, he said, "requires well-thought-out verification and test activities."

Goldin explicitly described the adverse impact of "our difficulties with recent failures in late stages of development -- such as system integration and testing -- and during mission operations." The memo did not specifically attribute these problems to the Mars failures.

The Mars Polar Lander also deployed two small "penetrator" probes, both called Deep Space 2. They were designed to fall freely through the thin atmosphere, hit the ground at about 200 meters per second (400 miles per hour), and come to rest deep in the soil.

All attempts to pick up radio signals from these probes, relayed via another spacecraft already orbiting Mars, also failed. Reportedly, the review board believes that the probe radio equipment could not have survived the impact.

Alternately, the probes may simply have hit ground too rocky for survival. Engineers also suspected that their batteries, which had been charged before launch almost a year earlier and not checked since then, might not have retained sufficient power.

"Nobody in the know really expected either of the penetrators to work," UPI's primary source said.

Dr. Carl Pilcher, head of NASA's planetary program, talked with space scientists at last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston. While expressing disappointment at the setbacks and skepticism of ambitious flight schedules -- "Our ambition exceeded our grasp," he told the scientists -- he would not discuss the results of the accident investigation.

The conclusions, he did admit, "make sober reading." The investigation was led by Tom Young, a former manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which runs most of NASA's deep space probes.

"Goldin recently told his managers that the Young report will be the Rogers Commission of space science," Andrew Lawler wrote in the March 10 issue of Science magazine, "referring to the devastating critique delivered by a panel that examined the 1986 Challenger disaster."

And in a March 9 internal memo from JPL director Ed Stone, which UPI has obtained, space workers are warned that "the days ahead may at times be difficult."

According to Lori Garver, NASA's associate administrator for plans, the report on NSA's failures will be reviewed internally and then will be sent to the White House before being released to the public.

*****************

NASA, Stanford wait for Mars lander to phone home

January 26, 2000
Web posted at: 12:43 PM EST (1743 GMT)

From staff and wire reports

PASADENA, California (CNN) -- After determining that a weak radio signal could have come from the Mars Polar Lander, scientists with NASA and Stanford University will listen Wednesday for signs that the wayward spacecraft might somehow be alive and operating.

Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena instructed the lander to send a signal to an antenna at Stanford University at about 1 p.m. (4 p.m. EST). NASA said that several days would be needed to process the data.

"This week's test is a real long-shot, and I wouldn't want to get anyone too excited about it," Polar Lander project manager Richard Cook said after the radio commands were sent to Mars on Tuesday.

NASA scientists last week officially abandoned their efforts to locate the ill-fated $165 million lander, which disappeared on December 3 as it started its descent to the surface of the red planet.

After weeks of fruitless attempts to raise the lander by radio, JPL mission controllers appeared resigned to their second major failure on a Mars mission in three months following the September loss of the Mars Climate Observer.

But they experienced renewed hopes this week after scientists at Stanford University's 150 foot (45 meter) antenna reported that a review of data revealed what might have been an extremely weak signal from Mars during tests on December 18 and January 4.

"The signal that the Stanford team detected is definitely artificial, but there are any one of a number of places it could have originated on or near Earth," Cook said in a statement released by NASA. "Still, we need to conduct this test to rule out the possibility that the signal could be coming from Polar Lander."

The latest set of radio signals were sent to Mars at 10 a.m. Pacific time (1 p.m. EST) on Tuesday. They instructed the craft, if it is operating, to send a signal to the antenna at Stanford about 27 hours later.

"The Stanford receiving station will listen again during the window on Wednesday to see if it picks up a signal that could originate from Mars," NASA said.

NASA cautioned that even if the signal were coming from the lander, there was "little hope" that any portion of the spacecraft's original scientific mission to probe the Martian surface for signs of water could be completed.

The signal is extremely weak, which would indicate a failure in the lander's primary transmitter. It is unlikely that the problem could be corrected or that data could be returned.

"However, it would give the team a few more clues in trying to eliminate possible failure modes," the NASA statement said.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Report: Mars Lander May Have Broke Apart

.c The Associated Press

DENVER (Jan. 6, 00) - The vanished Mars Polar Lander probably broke apart in a canyon, The Denver Post reported today, citing scientists who suggested the landing site was the reason for NASA's latest failure.

The $165 million lander was supposed to touch down Dec. 3 for a 90-day mission to analyze the planet's atmosphere and search for frozen water beneath its south pole. It has not been heard from since it started its descent after an 11-month cruise, and NASA has not offered a reason for the disappearance.

Members of the Lockheed Martin team who maneuvered the craft to Mars believe a canyon nearly a mile deep and 6 miles wide in some places was the landing site, the Post reported, citing an unidentified source at the aeronautics company who was on the mission team.

The source relied on ``probable'' landing coordinates posted online by NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Lab officials acknowledged that they knew the canyon was in the area.

``We believe we landed in a region that was in the vicinity (of the canyon) but we have no way of knowing whether it hit those slopes,'' said Daniel McCleese, the Mars Surveyor Program scientist at JPL.

The loss of the lander came less than three months after bungled communications between Lockheed and JPL caused the Mars Climate Orbiter to burn up in the Martian atmosphere.

Lockheed scientists were reportedly surprised to learn that the canyon was inside the lander's projected landing zone. During the mission, Lockheed scientists steered the craft under JPL direction.

``No one on our side knew that canyon was there,'' the Lockheed source told the Post. ``All of the sudden, two weeks later, we got this MOLA data'' - topographical maps and images - ``and it was like, 'Look at that hole!'''

McCleese said mission scientists believed the south polar region offered ``some of the safest places on Mars.''

However, he said, the planet is covered with craters and canyons and it is impossible to remotely place a spacecraft at a precise location. He also said JPL scientists couldn't find a single landing zone on the planet's generally smooth south pole without a hazard.

AP-NY-01-06-00 0547EST

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Note from the Moderator: I don't know who this e-mail originated with. I'm passing it on from a trusted friend who says she trusts the originator. Dee

From: xxxxxxxxxx <xxxxfreeserve.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 11:21:21 -0000
Fwd Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 09:25:54 -0500
Subject: Re: Polar Lander?

I have just had this sent to me and I am forwarding it for comments or information which sheds light.

I know the source of this message very well, and I can assure you that if he says he sat and watched it on Terrestrial TV here in the UK, you can be certain this did happen as it described below. Did this interview also appear on any US news feeds?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1999 1:05 AM
Subject: Polar Lander

...been watching the BBC News 24 lately in the very early hours of the morning. On two nights together the Polar Lander was featured. On the first night A guy from NASA was being given a hard time by some other guy who was asking why they were lying about its not working when in fact it was sending data in a coded fashion.

On the second night the BBC told the story of a disgruntled NASA employee who has, supposedly, placed the necessary de-coding information on the net to enable people to de-code the info sent by the Lander.

I don't know if this second guy is Kosher or not. Is there anything flying around the net on the subject?

The guy on the first night also accused NASA of lying about the Climate Orbiter burning up and that it was also sending coded info back to NASA.

Interesting that the BBC should feature this, eh? Also interesting that they should only feature it when most people are in bed, but to be expected!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Plans for Future Mars Missions

.c The Associated Press

NASA Administrator Dan Goldin signaled a slowdown in the space agency's ambitious Mars program after the near-certain loss of Mars Polar Lander. A look at the missions as planned before the failure:

- 2001: An orbiter and lander similar to the two spacecraft lost this year. The lander is to touch down near the equator, carrying a spare Mars Pathfinder rover, robotic arm and other science instruments. Because of the recent losses, the mission is likely to undergo major changes.

- 2003: The first of two sample-collection missions. The lander and rover will search for soil and rock samples and take them to a small rocket that will send the material into Martian orbit.

- 2005: In the second sample mission, a lander and rover will collect more material and a small rocket will carry it to orbit. A spacecraft built by the French space agency will be sent to the Red Planet to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth in 2008.

- 2007-2009: More sample return missions planned.

- 2011-2013: Plans might include permanent robotic outposts where complex science missions are carried out.

AP-NY-12-07-99 1851EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mars Polar Lander Mission Costs

.c The Associated Press

Cost breakdowns for NASA's Mars Polar Lander and the accompanying Deep Space 2 microprobes:

Mars Polar Lander

Spacecraft development: $110 million.

Mission operations: $10 million.

Boeing Delta II launch: About $45 million.

Total: $165 million.

Deep Space 2

Pre-launch development: $28 million.

Data analysis: $1.6 million.

Total: $29.6 million.

Combined total: $194.6 million.

Mars Polar Lander was funded by NASA's Mars Explorations program. Deep Space 2 was developed separately under the New Millennium program budget.

NASA is precluded from releasing the specific Delta II launch cost under its contract. Boeing lists the price of a commercial Delta II launch at about $55 million. The cost to NASA is presumed lower because it is part of a multi-launch contract package.

AP-NY-12-07-99 1846EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NASA To Examine Entire Mars Program

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 7) - NASA abandoned any real hope Tuesday for the missing-in-action Mars Polar Lander and promised to investigate every aspect of the failed mission and delay future expeditions to the Red Planet if necessary.

The last, best chance to make radio contact with the spacecraft yielded only silence early Tuesday. A somber Richard Cook, the spacecraft's operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the flight team had ''played its last ace.''

NASA said it will undertake a complete review of its ambitious Mars program, which has now lost three spacecraft since 1993 - two of them in back-to-back failures over the past three months.

''Clearly something is wrong, and we have to understand it,'' NASA Administrator Dan Goldin said. ''It is conceivable that we will completely change our approach.''

Critics have accused the space agency of trying to do too much with too little money with its ''faster, better, cheaper'' approach to spaceflight, in which smaller, less expensive probes are launched more often than in the past.

NASA officials agreed Tuesday that goals may be too high, but they stopped short of saying they would seek more funding.

''The thing we will not do is use this as an excuse to have a raid on the federal government,'' Goldin said.

Mars Polar Lander was on a mission to study the atmosphere and search for water, which could help scientists determine whether life ever existed on Mars. But NASA hasn't heard from the spacecraft since it attempted to land on Red Planet on Friday.

Over four days and six opportunities to make contact, NASA methodically eliminated possibilities that would explain the lander's silence, including a mispointed antenna or a computer reset.

Among other possibilities: It crashed, burned up in the atmosphere, or was doomed by landing in a bad spot on the Martian soil.

Efforts to reach it will continue for about two weeks, but no answer is expected.

A NASA failure review board will be asked to explore whether enough was known about the landing site, if the spacecraft was adequately designed and whether NASA had enough money to achieve its goals.

The investigation could delay the next mission to Mars, which is now scheduled for 2001. Mars Surveyor 2001, consisting of an orbiter and lander, is similar to the Polar Lander and the also-lost Mars Climate Orbiter.

''Everything is on the table, and we're not going to just go rushing off, build a spacecraft just to meet an arbitrary deadline,'' Goldin told The Associated Press.

The Mars Climate Observer apparently burned up as it was about to go into orbit around Mars on Sept. 23. The loss was largely blamed on an embarrassing failure to covert measurements into metric units.

John Pike, a space policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, and other experts believe a slight increase in funding could make the Mars missions successful without returning to the days of rare, multibillion-dollar missions like Viking and Voyager.

''If these failures are an indication that they either need more money or fewer missions, I'd prefer to see a little more money than fewer missions,'' Pike said.

Goldin didn't call for any major changes to NASA's ''faster, better, cheaper'' approach. The policy was started after the 1993 disappearance of the $1 billion Mars Observer and was intended to spread risk over several missions. An investigation determined that the Observer probably exploded while its fuel lines were being pressurized.

''When we started 'faster, better, cheaper,' we said we'd be happy with seven or eight out of 10 successes because we're going to set some really tough goals, and when we have problems we'll take a pause and go fix them,'' Goldin said.

''I'll tell you this: We ain't going back to multibillion-dollar spacecraft that take a decade. If you lose that spacecraft like we lost Mars Observer, then you lose a whole generation of scientists.''

The losses could be compounded if Congress uses the failures as a reason to reduce funding. Last summer, there were unsuccessful attempts to cut the space agency's budget by $900 million.

''NASA has already suffered cuts and is a very easy target for those of us in Congress,'' said Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., a strong NASA supporter. ''But every time there has been a setback, we've seen the program charge back.''

Experts said it is too early to speculate on specific reorganizations or changes in the relationship with Lockheed Martin Astronautics, which built both failed spacecraft and was responsible for the Climate Orbiter metric mixup.

AP-NY-12-07-99 1818EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mars Polar Lander On Ice

Still No Radio Signal From Polar Lander 'Last Best' Opportunity Passes Early Tuesday Failure Considered A Major Setback For NASA

PASADENA, California

Tuesday, December 07,1999 - 04:41 AM ET

CBS

(AP) NASA again failed to detect a signal from the Mars Polar Lander early Tuesday during what engineers called the “last best” opportunity to hear from the spacecraft.

Any chance of ever contacting the $165 million probe is now remote at best, mission controllers conceded after eliminating all simple explanations for the lander's silence. It was last heard from Friday morning before starting its descent.

Engineers believed they would receive a signal from the spacecraft early Tuesday if it had slipped into protective safe mode after landing. Now, any scenarios that would explain the silence are much more complicated and less plausible, they said.

It is much more likely that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will have to investigate the second loss of a Mars mission in less than three months. But unlike September's Climate Orbiter disaster, the cause will likely be much more difficult if not impossible.

The space agency has only scant information on the final moments of the spacecraft's attempt to land on Mars, and no hope of recovering any wreckage more than 157 million miles from Earth.

“It may be that everything went right and it simply landed in a terrible spot,” said physics professor Robert Park, a University of Maryland expert on the space program. “Who knows if it landed on a big boulder and fell over?”

“We just don't know, and we never will, is my guess,” he said.

It could be two weeks before the mission is declared a failure, said Richard Cook, the spacecraft's operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

If the mission did fail, one critical piece of information could be acquired by the powerful cameras of NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor, a satellite that is mapping the surface of Mars. Cook said NASA will look for evidence of the lander's parachute.

The satellite's eyes are not strong enough to see the lander itself, he added.

As in the aftermath of the Mars Climate Orbiter, NASA would appoint a failure review board of internal and outside experts to study every aspect of the mission from its development to disappearance.

NASA quickly established why Mars Climate Orbiter vanished: Trajectory data showed that it hit the atmosphere at too low an altitude and burned up. By looking at navigation data, they discovered someone failed to convert measurements into metric units.

But Polar Lander's trajectory and condition were excellent up until communication was lost as expected as the spacecraft positioned itself for entry.

The scenario is similar to the 1993 loss of the $1 billion Mars Observer. In that case, a four-month investigation whittled down 60 possible causes and determined that ruptured fuel lines were the most likely cause of the spacecraft's sudden disappearance just three days before it was to begin circling the Red Planet.

Polar Lander investigators will probably scour photographs taken as the spacecraft was being built. They could reveal whether any critical parts were not to specification a big worry in this era of faster and cheaper space exploration, said John Pike, a space analyst for the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists.

“Those photos are to spacecraft accident investigations what the flight data recorder is to aircraft accident investigations,” he said.

If a smoking gun is found in pictures or spacecraft data, the investigation could last only a few weeks. Officials will probably want to have answers before the next Mars orbiter and lander are delivered to the launch pad in 2001.

NASA officials said it is too soon to determine the effect of the spacecraft's probable loss on future missions.

But Pat Dasch, executive director at the National Space Society, a private group in Washington that supports the space program, suggested the result of this “very unhappy situation” could be a “top-to-bottom review of systems management here on planet Earth.”

“That will cause a slowdown and a shakeup, I predict,” she said.

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Future Mars Missions Face Scrutiny

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 6, 99) - NASA's 2001 mission to Mars, the third installment of the space agency's ambitious campaign to the Red Planet, now faces uncertainty with the growing likelihood that the Polar Lander is lost forever.

The lander failed to signal Earth for a third day Sunday, though engineers held out hope the probe still might signal its well-being. If not, it would be the second loss of a Mars probe in less than three months.

In addition to the missed science, the disappearances raise fears that the next mission - already late in development using designs and systems from the 1999 missions - also could have fatal flaws.

The space agency has been launching orbiters and landers every 26 months since Pathfinder in 1996 to explore the Red Planet's climate history, geology and water, paving the way for samples to be returned and, eventually, humans to be rocketed to Mars.

In the rush to launch probes faster and more cheaply, components and systems from one mission are often duplicated in another. It usually is a reliable way to cut down on development costs.

The fear is that whatever might have caused the $165 million Mars Polar Lander - as well as two tiny probes designed to fall separately from orbit and plunge into the surface - to disappear could affect the Mars Surveyor 2001 mission.

But until Mars Polar Lander is actually confirmed lost and investigators are able to determine a cause, it is impossible to know how such a loss would affect future missions, said Carl Pilcher, NASA's science director for solar system exploration.

''There's no question because of the similarity of designs ... if the lander were to be lost, surely it would have an impact on what we're doing in '01,'' he said. ''What that impact would be is impossible to say right now.''

Polar Lander and its 2001 cousin have similar structures, landing systems and protective heat shields. Both were designed and built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics, where the metrics mix-up that doomed the Mars Climate Orbiter originated.

''Whenever we have a problem of any type, we re-evaluate where that might be used in the future,'' said Sylvia Miller, a Mars program architect at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ''We look at what might be needed to be changed.''

The Sept. 23 loss of Climate Orbiter will be felt more in how future missions are run than how the spacecraft are made. Investigators were critical of JPL for failing to catch the error that caused the $125 million probe to burn up in the Martian atmosphere.

A report blamed the loss on a failure to convert navigation data from English units used by one group of technicians to the metric system used by a different team. Investigators also found the orbiter program understaffed and navigators lacking knowledge about the spacecraft. Poor communication between JPL and Lockheed Martin also was cited.

NASA added more engineers to the Polar Lander flight team and reviewed every aspect of the mission. Another report will be issued Feb. 1 to address the issue of future missions.

The 2001 mission is near the end of development in a phase of integration and testing, Miller said. A lander is to be launched that year on April 10 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., while an orbiter will take off March 30 from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Santa Barbara, Calif.

A small rover - an exact duplicate of the Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner - will accompany the lander, which will carry mineralogy experiments, a robotic arm and instruments to conduct the first assessments of radiation on Mars.

The orbiter will carry a gamma-ray spectrometer that will attempt to measure the abundance of frozen water immediately beneath the surface - something Polar Lander was supposed to do locally near Mars' south pole.

Missions still under review for 2003 and 2005 would collect soil and rock samples that would be returned to Earth in 2008.

One benefit of quick, inexpensive missions is that instruments lost on one probe could be duplicated and squeezed onto a future mission, Pilcher said.

''Because we have a continuing program, we have opportunities to recover the science,'' he said.

AP-NY-12-06-99 0345EDT

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NASA Fails To Contact Mars Lander

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 7, 99) - The last realistic opportunity to contact the silent Mars Polar Lander ended today with no sign of life from the missing spacecraft, all but ending hope that the $165 million mission can be saved.

Engineers have now eliminated all simple explanations for why they have not heard from the probe since its descent into the Martian atmosphere Friday. Two microprobes that were to have landed separately also were lost.

''After four increasingly difficult days, the Mars Polar Lander flight team played its last ace,'' a somber Richard Cook, the spacecraft's operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said after today's early morning attempt.

The Mars Polar Lander is the second spacecraft to be lost over the Red Planet in less than three months. Like with Mars Climate Orbiter, internal investigators and outside experts will look at every detail of the mission - from development to disappearance.

This time, the Mars program as well as the space agency itself are likely to come under scrutiny. The pace of spacecraft development, budgets and launch rates all will be explored, said Dan McCleese, chief scientist of the Mars program at JPL.

''We need to ask ourselves what is the next best step to take from an engineering and science perspective to help us get a fresh look on how that balance can be played out,'' he said.

Over four days and six contact opportunities, engineers methodically eliminated possibilities that would explain the lander's silence, including a mispointed antenna, an inoperative direct-to-Earth connection and other computer safe-mode scenarios.

Efforts to reach it will continue for about two weeks, but no answer is expected. Any of those scenarios are much more complicated and even less plausible than those already tried, Cook said.

The exact cause of the failure is likely to be much more difficult to figure out than September's loss of Mars Climate Orbiter. Of 25 previous U.S. and Russian missions to Mars since 1962, 11 have failed and four did not have complete missions.

NASA quickly established why the orbiter vanished: Trajectory data showed that it flew too close to the planet and burned up in the Martian atmosphere. By looking at navigation reports, scientists discovered someone failed to convert measurements into metric units.

But Polar Lander's trajectory and condition were excellent until communication was lost - as expected - as the spacecraft positioned itself for entry.

The space agency has only scant information on the final moments of Polar Lander and no hope of recovering any wreckage more than 157 million miles from Earth.

''It may be that everything went right and it simply landed in a terrible spot,'' said physics professor Robert Park, a University of Maryland expert on the space program. ''Who knows if it landed on a big boulder and fell over?''

''We just don't know, and we never will, is my guess,'' he said.

One critical piece of information could be acquired by the powerful cameras of NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor, a satellite that is mapping the surface of Mars. Cook said NASA will look for evidence of the lander's parachute.

The satellite's eyes are not strong enough to see the lander itself, he added.

Polar Lander investigators also will scour photographs taken as the spacecraft was being built. They could reveal whether any critical parts were not to specification - a big worry in this era of faster and cheaper space exploration, said John Pike, a space analyst for the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists.

''Those photos are to spacecraft accident investigations what the flight data recorder is to aircraft accident investigations,'' he said.

Pat Dasch, executive director at the National Space Society, a private group in Washington that supports the space program, suggested the result of this ''very unhappy situation'' could be a ''top-to-bottom review of systems management here on planet Earth.''

''That will cause a slowdown and a shakeup, I predict,'' she said.

AP-NY-12-07-99 0755EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Future Mars Missions Face Scrutiny

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

In the rush to launch probes faster and more cheaply, components and systems from one mission are often duplicated in another. It usually is a reliable way to cut down on development costs.

But until Mars Polar Lander is actually confirmed lost and investigators are able to determine a cause, it is impossible to know how such a loss would affect future missions, said Carl Pilcher, NASA's science director for solar system exploration.

Polar Lander and its 2001 cousin have similar structures, landing systems and protective heat shields. Both were designed and built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics, where the metrics mix-up that doomed the Mars Climate Orbiter originated.

NASA added more engineers to the Polar Lander flight team and reviewed every aspect of the mission. Another report will be issued Feb. 1 to address the issue of future missions.

A small rover - an exact duplicate of the Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner - will accompany the lander, which will carry mineralogy experiments, a robotic arm and instruments to conduct the first assessments of radiation on Mars.

Missions still under review for 2003 and 2005 would collect soil and rock samples that would be returned to Earth in 2008.

One benefit of quick, inexpensive missions is that instruments lost on one probe could be duplicated and squeezed onto a future mission, Pilcher said.

''Because we have a continuing program, we have opportunities to recover the science,'' he said.

AP-NY-12-06-99 0345EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mars Probes Appear Lost Forever

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 6, 99) - Two tiny probes that rode aboard Mars Polar Lander but separated before entry appear to be lost forever as efforts to contact the larger spacecraft also continued without success.

Mission controllers, looking increasingly gloomy and exhausted after failing for three days to detect signs of life from any of the spacecraft, admitted late Sunday it is growing more likely that contact may never be made.

''Clearly the team is getting more frustrated, certainly, and more tense about all of this,'' said Richard Cook, operations project manager for the Polar Lander.

If no signals are heard, it would be total loss for the entire, $330 million Mars '98 project, which consisted of Polar Lander, the Deep Space 2 microprobes and the Climate Orbiter, which burned up over the Red Planet in September.

The softball-sized microprobes were supposed to slam into the surface at 400 mph to test a new descent technique that did not use expensive parachutes or rockets to break the fall from space. If the test flight had been successful, future microprobe missions could be sent to cover a wider territory at less cost than current spacecraft.

The $29.6 million probes were to have emitted their first signals on arrival Friday, like Polar Lander. Every two hours, the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor tried to detect any transmissions from the microprobes to no success.

The probes also had been programmed to transmit automatically once every five minutes if they did not receive commands from Global Surveyor after 29 and 32 hours. No signals were picked up during those opportunities as well.

''If we haven't heard from them in the next 24 hours, we will have exhausted our opportunities to hear from them,'' said Sarah Gavit, the probes' project manager.

Aside from testing 10 new spaceflight technologies, each probe was equipped with a bullet-like penetrator that was to burrow up to 2 feet beneath the surface and test for frozen water. A unit containing a small radio would remain on the surface.

The probes could have survived a wide range of soils ranging in consistency from coffee grinds to permafrost, Gavit said.

Estimates of their trajectory based on the last data from the lander indicated over the weekend that they might have fallen into a crater, near a region of sand dunes. Both scenarios are potentially fatal.

The probes' batteries, which could barely power a Christmas tree light, also could have frozen in temperatures reaching minus 185 degrees Fahrenheit.

Meanwhile, the $165 million Polar Lander controllers attempted to find a signal for the third straight day Sunday. Several windows of opportunity came and went over the weekend with no sign of life from the unmanned craft.

Mission managers worked on eliminating simple failure scenarios one by one. But they conceded that if, after trying all the obvious remedies, contact still has not been established by midweek, the explanations for the failure would become more complex and the prospects of success would greatly diminish.

''When you start stacking - if this thing has to fail and then this thing has to fail and then this thing has to fail to get into this circumstance - then you're definitely in extra time,'' Cook said. ''We're not there yet. I think we will be, come Tuesday morning.''

Sunday's first communications window - designed to use a second antenna - opened at 10:50 a.m. PST and closed 10 minutes later without any transmission from the surface of the Red Planet.

The lander, if working properly, was supposed to have switched radios to relay a signal through Global Surveyor, instead of transmitting directly to Earth. But the mapping spacecraft sent only its own data and none from the lander.

Sunday's second communications opportunity, using the original antenna, opened at 9:40 p.m. PST. After the window was open for several minutes, scientists still had not detected any signals from the lander.

Lack of any signals since shortly before Friday's scheduled landing left mission officials with hope only that the lander survived the touchdown and, on its own, was taking steps to establish contact.

Mars Polar Lander could have gotten into trouble simply by setting down in difficult terrain.

''Landing on Mars is very hard - and it's the part where you're landing that's really hard,'' said Cook. ''It doesn't take much to have problems.''

AP-NY-12-06-99 0555EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MARS POLAR LANDER

December 5, 1999

Scientists Scramble to Restore Signals to Martian Mission

PASADENA, Calif. -- Concern over the fate of the Mars Polar Lander deepened on Saturday after flight controllers failed repeatedly to receive any radio signals from it on the planet's surface and were forced to fall back on alternative tactics in an effort to establish communications.

Although mission officials emphasized that they were not giving up, they conceded that their chances of success would be diminishingly slim if they are unable to hear from the robotic spacecraft in a test on Sunday. That is when the lander, following instructions already programmed in its computer, is supposed to relay a radio transmission through another spacecraft, the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been orbiting Mars since 1997

The critical 15-minute transmission, if it occurs, is to be beamed by another of the lander's antennas, one that is omni-directional and thus more likely to cast wide signals that may reach Earth even if the craft is resting in a tilted or sunken position on the surface of the Martian south polar region.

"That's clearly a good milestone," Richard Cook, the project manager here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said of the attempt on Sunday.

Dr. Edward J. Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for space sciences, said, "If anything's alive on the spacecraft, we should hear it on Sunday."

But Cook said that flight controllers were "still upbeat" and had a "long list" of other contingency plans for trying to hear from the lander. Another effort to hear signals through the regular antenna was made late Saturday night, also without success.

[A window of opportunity for contact with the still-silent spacecraft opened at 11:30 p.m. EST on Saturday, and nothing was received, the Associated Press reported.

[NASA sent up commands for the space craft antenna to scan the sky in search of the Earth, but it was not expected to produce any results.

[During the next opportunity, the spacecraft is programmed to automatically send signals using a different antenna Sunday morning.]

Even if these procedures are unsuccessful, Cook said, "We will continue to look beyond Sunday."

But in the anxious wait, there was a growing fear that the spacecraft may be disabled or could have crashed, dooming a $165 million mission critical to exploring Mars for evidence of conditions that could support some simple forms of life, past or present.

Compounding the concerns was the fact that flight controllers have failed so far to make radio contact with the two small probes the spacecraft was supposed to have released before it entered the Martian atmosphere. The probes were to slam into the Martian surface and penetrate the frigid ground, as part of the mission's search for evidence of water ice on the planet.

The basketball-size probes should have started sending radio messages through the Global Surveyor on Friday night. Several attempts to pick up signals have produced nothing but silence.

The last flight controllers heard from the main spacecraft before its landing attempt was, as planned, about 11 minutes before it was to touch down at 3:01 p.m. (Eastern time) on Friday. All systems appeared to be operating normally then, and the craft's aim on the planet seemed to be right on target. Then it began turning itself around to head toward the upper fringes of the Martian atmosphere.

An analysis of tracking data just before the communications blackout, scientists said, indicated that the lander, if it survived, would have come to rest on smooth ground at a site that on maps looks like an amphitheater. A low ridge is nearby, but the angle of the slopes appeared to be no more than two degrees.

A similar analysis showed that the two probes should have hit on a somewhat more hazardous landscape, said Dr. Suzanne Smreker, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She estimated that the probes struck in or near a small crater with about 10-degree slopes.

The continued loss of communications from both the lander and the two probes raised speculation that their troubles might be related. Asked if a single malfunction could have been the cause, Cook said that the only possibility that readily came to mind would have been at an event that was to have occurred a minute after the planned communications loss.

At that time, five minutes before entry into the atmosphere, the spacecraft was to have jettisoned a section that had supplied power and other services during the 11-month cruise toward Mars, now 157 million miles from Earth. The two probes also rode piggyback on that section. They were to be released 18 seconds after the section's separation.

If for some reason the separation never occurred, engineers said, that could have destabilized the lander's descent with possibly catastrophic consequences. And the probes might not have been properly deployed. But engineers cautioned that this was only speculation.

In any event, the first three times tracking stations on Earth listened for signals from the lander on Friday they heard nothing. Commands were sent to the lander to cast its radio signals over a wider sweep of the sky in the hope of linking with Earth. But controllers had no way of knowing if the lander received the commands or could act on them.

Mission officials held out hope that the polar lander's troubles might prove temporary. Perhaps it came down at an odd angle, or it sank a few inches into a crusty surface. In either case, its position might be preventing the antenna programmed for the initial radio contact from establishing a "downlink." The wider Earth-seeking broadcasts of signals might eventually bring results.

But there was also the possibility, Cook said, that the lander's instruments for determining its orientation on Mars and its relation to Earth were malfunctioning.

The lander's uncertain fate was a reminder of past tribulations in Mars exploration, most recently in September. At that time, the Mars Climate Orbiter, reached the planet but navigation errors brought it in too close and to its probable destruction. It has not been heard from since its final approach while trying to swing into orbit.

Nearly all of the Soviet Union's efforts to send spacecraft to Mars ended in failure or limited success. Although the American program had notable successes with Mariner 9 as the first to orbit and map the planet, in 1971, and the two Viking orbiters and landers in 1976, two of its Mariner spacecraft, one in 1964 and another in 1971, failed shortly after liftoff. And in 1993, the $1 billion Mars Observer failed mysteriously just as it approached the planet.

Stunned by the loss of such an expensive craft, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shifted its exploration strategy to a reliance on smaller spacecraft with more limited objectives but launched frequently and with less risk to the program if any one should fail. The first of these, Mars Pathfinder in 1997, landed on a flood plain for geological studies and was an impressive success. Its companion, Global Surveyor, arrived a few months later and is producing the most detailed maps yet of the surface.

Scientists were counting on this year's missions, the climate orbiter and the polar lander, to investigate climate history of Mars and search out its water resources in an effort to learn if life might have arisen there long ago. The question of life is motivating future planning for more missions to Mars in the next decade, two at each 26-month opportunity, leading up to the return of soil samples.

As a Mars Landing Nears, NASA Says All Seems Fine

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

(December 3, 1999) After an 11-month cruise across interplanetary space, the Mars Polar Lander was pronounced sound and ready to live up to its name by setting down on the cold, high ground near the Martian south pole.

asadena, Calif. -- After an 11-month cruise across interplanetary space, the Mars Polar Lander was pronounced sound and on course Thursday and ready to live up to its name by setting down on the cold, high ground near the Martian south pole.

The landing, the first at the polar region of another planet, is scheduled for 3:01 p.m. (Eastern time) on Friday. NASA's reliance on new technologies and the strange polar environment that is the spacecraft's destination seemed to make mission officials and scientists increasingly apprehensive about the chances for success.

"There's still a very real possibility that we may not hear anything," Richard Cook, the project manager for the mission, said of the moments after the spacecraft is due to land. Silence could signal anything from a minor communications lapse to a serious malfunction.

But if the landing is a success, the robotic spacecraft will begin pros pecting the landscape of dirt and ice for traces of water and evidence of the planet's climatic history, all part of the greater quest to learn if life in some form ever arose on Mars or could still exist in moist, sheltered niches. The explorations are expected to continue for three months, through the continuous daylight of summer in the Martian polar latitudes.

Dr. David Paige, a project scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the spacecraft was being aimed "as close as we possibly can get to a place where there is likely to be ice."

The 1,200-pound spacecraft is supposed to settle down on a relatively smooth, rolling surface of broad terraces a few hundred miles from the south pole. The "target sector," at about 76 degrees south latitude and 195 degrees west longitude, is far from the edge of the permanent polar ice cap, but far enough south that only a few weeks ago the surface was still covered by the carbon dioxide frost of winter.

"It's a completely different terrain from any previous landing sites on Mars," Dr. Paige said.

An analysis of recent photography by another spacecraft orbiting Mars showed the landing area to be marked by long, low parallel ridges, shallow gullies and depressions, and scattered protruding knobs, all shaped by the presence of ice on the surface and underground and the coming and going of seasonal frosts.

Dr. Sam Thurman, flight operations manager for the project here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the spacecraft was being continuously tracked and its navigation instructions checked and revised in the final hours of its approach. A slight correction in its flight path could be made as late as six and a half hours before entry into the thin Martian atmosphere.

If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will turn its nose forward for the plunge into the atmosphere. It will shed a segment that supported its interplanetary flight. And then it will release two probes, each the size of a basketball. They are to smash into the Martian surface several miles away from where the spacecraft will come to rest.

Speeding in at 15,400 miles an hour, the spacecraft will enter the upper fringes of Martian air for the five and a half minute descent to landing. Atmospheric friction will start the braking process, raising temperatures on the spacecraft's heat-shield to 3,000 degrees. About two minutes before landing, the craft's parachute will unfurl, then its three metal legs will be deployed and a camera will snap pictures of the looming polar landscape.

Finally, 12 rocket thrusters will fire to slow the descent to five miles an hour when the lander is just above the surface. The exhaust is expected to kick up plumes of polar dust.

It will be 4:20 a.m., local time on Mars, and 12:01 p.m. (3:01 p.m. EST) at the control room here. But because the craft must wait for the dust to settle before it deploy an antenna, and because radio signals take 14 minutes to reach Earth from Mars, flight controllers do not expect to receive confirmation of a successful landing until 12:39.

If all goes well, the spacecraft's first radio transmission is supposed to last 45 minutes and include camera shots of its footpads and the surface nearby. But if the ground the lander happens to stand on is sloping, the craft may be tilted so that its small antenna cannot link up with Earth. Cook said the spacecraft's computer has instructions for correcting the problem on its own, or flight controllers could send new instructions through the craft's smaller but omni-directional antenna.

Within a couple of days of obtaining a communications link, the polar lander craft should be sending a regular flow of pictures and reports on temperatures, air pressure and humidity in the frigid region. On late Tuesday or Wednesday, the craft's six-and-a half-foot-long mechanical arm is to begin scratching and digging in the soil, collecting samples to examine for the presence of water ice. Unless the ground is frozen solid, the digger should be able to reach down 20 inches for samples.

"We have good reason to believe there is water in the polar soil," Dr. Paige said. "The question is how deep, in what form and how abundant is the water."

The two microprobes, called Deep Space 2, were designed to penetrate even deeper, perhaps three feet or more, in the search for evidence of water. They will slam into the surface at 400 miles an hour, burrowing in with instruments and a radio.

Robotic Adventurer Aims for Mars' South Pole

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

(November 30, 1999) Less than a century after explorers made their first heroic assault on the poles of Earth, an American spacecraft is racing toward Mars and the first landing in the polar region of another planet.

Less than a century after explorers made their first heroic assault on the poles of Earth, an American spacecraft is racing toward Mars and the first landing in the polar region of another planet.

The New York Times

The robotic Mars Polar Lander is being aimed for a landing on Friday on the vast terraces of ice and dust a few hundred miles from the planet's south pole. Spring is turning to summer there, the season of constant sunlight, which the spacecraft will draw on for energy to power its computer and transmitter and array of cameras, sensors, digging arm and ovens for heating and analyzing soil samples.

Over the next three months of steady sunlight, if all goes well, the spacecraft will prospect the frigid landscape for water and investigate the surroundings -- in the thin air above, on the surface and underground -- for clues to the planet's climate history. Photographs taken by previous spacecraft orbiting Mars reveal the polar terrain to be layered with the residue of dust and ice, each layer of varying thicknesses reflecting weather patterns in the past.

The $165 million mission will thus be seeking answers to the two most important scientific questions about Mars: where is the water and was the planet significantly warmer and wetter in its early history, as suggested by abundant evidence of surface erosion? These questions strike at the heart of the larger question of whether life in some form could ever have arisen on Mars.

"This is really the first in a series of missions that will explore on the surface different parts of the planet, particularly looking for water," said Dr. David Paige, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "We know there's water in the atmosphere. We don't know where else there's water on Mars."

Mission scientists liken their strategy for exploring the layered polar terrain to the reading of tree rings or ice cores in learning about Earth's climate history.

Within a week of settling on the surface, about 500 miles from the pole, the lander is to flex its 6.5-foot mechanical arm and begin digging a trench about 20 inches deep. In winter, carbon dioxide frost would probably be covering the site. Now the surface will probably be fine dust, left by wind storms that frequently blow over the planet. A tiny camera mounted on the arm will take color pictures of the soil and trench walls.

Since there is water vapor in the atmosphere, scientists expect to find some water ice in the soil. The mechanical arm is to scoop up soil samples and place them in ovens for analysis by instruments designed by the University of Arizona. The electric ovens will heat the samples to see what gases are released. By measuring the amount of water vapor and carbon dioxide gas, scientists will be able to determine the amount of ice beneath the surface, as well as minerals that may have formed when Mars had a warmer climate. Eight samples are expected to be examined during the mission.

"Everything we know about life says that water is an essential part of it," said Dr. William V. Boynton, a University of Arizona planetary scientist who developed the instruments for testing the soil. "If Mars was always as dry as it appears now to be, then it's not very likely life could have ever gotten started. But if there really were oceans on Mars at one time, that's exciting."

The craft is also carrying two probes, each the size of a basketball, for penetrating even deeper, perhaps more than three feet. It is supposed to release the probes just before entering the Mars atmosphere. The probes are to slam into Mars at 400 miles an hour, hitting 30 to 35 miles away about a minute ahead of the spacecraft. Each impact should drive a five-inch-long penetrator into the ground, where instruments are to heat soil to look for water vapor from any buried ice.

In honor of the first explorers to reach Earth's South Pole, the two probes have been named Amundsen and Scott. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen led the first successful expedition to the South Pole, reaching it on Dec. 14, 1911. Robert Falcon Scott, an Englishman, arrived with his team a month later, beaten in their quest and the entire team destined to die on their return trip.

The polar lander's other scientific instruments include a multispectral, stereoscopic camera for observing the landscape; a meteorology package for measuring air temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure and humidity, and a light detection and radar system, called lidar, that emits pulses of laser light for detecting clouds and hazes in the atmosphere.

Attached to the Russian-designed lidar is a small microphone supplied by the Planetary Society, a public-membership organization advocating space science exploration. The microphone will be used in an attempt to make the first recordings of sounds on the surface of Mars, possibly the murmur of winds whipping around the lander.

"It's an effort to bring all human senses to bear on the Red Planet," Dr. Paige of U.C.L.A. said. "We have already brought sight and touch to Mars, almost taste if you consider our analytical experiments with soil samples."

The science operations are being directed by Dr. Paige and teams of researchers from Denmark, Finland, Germany, Russia and other universities and institutions in the United States.

If successful, lander will be the fourth spacecraft to operate on the planet's surface. Two Viking spacecraft landed there in 1976, and Mars Pathfinder, with its tiny roving vehicle Sojourner, explored midlatitude geology in 1997.

Norman Haynes, director of systems management at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said the spacecraft was in "excellent condition and behaving exactly the way we designed it to do."

Engineers at the laboratory, which directs the mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, have spent weeks reviewing all navigation instructions that have been transmitted to the polar lander to avoid a repetition of the embarrassing mistake that doomed its traveling companion, the Mars Climate Orbiter. A mixup between English and metric units in navigation data sent the spacecraft off course, and probably to its destruction, as it was attempting to orbit Mars in September. All radio contact with the craft was lost.

As originally planned, the climate orbiter was to act as a communications relay station for the polar lander. The lander's own radio can transmit directly to Earth, but is too weak to handle the full data load.

"It's a loss but not a crippling one for the lander's mission," Dr. Paige said of the climate orbiter's failure.

Fortunately, another orbiting craft, Mars Global Surveyor, has been circling the planet on a mapping mission since 1997 and will be relied on as the lander's main link in communicating to Earth its discoveries in the southern polar region of Mars.

Less than a century after explorers made their first heroic assault on the poles of Earth, an American spacecraft is racing toward Mars and the first landing in the polar region of another planet.

The robotic Mars Polar Lander is being aimed for a landing on Friday on the vast terraces of ice and dust a few hundred miles from the planet's south pole. Spring is turning to summer there, the season of constant sunlight, which the spacecraft will draw on for energy to power its computer and transmitter and array of cameras, sensors, digging arm and ovens for heating and analyzing soil samples.

Mission scientists liken their strategy for exploring the layered polar terrain to the reading of tree rings or ice cores in learning about Earth's climate history.

"It's an effort to bring all human senses to bear on the Red Planet," Dr. Paige of U.C.L.A. said. "We have already brought sight and touch to Mars, almost taste if you consider our analytical experiments with soil samples."

The science operations are being directed by Dr. Paige and teams of researchers from Denmark, Finland, Germany, Russia and other universities and institutions in the United States.

Norman Haynes, director of systems management at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said the spacecraft was in "excellent condition and behaving exactly the way we designed it to do."

"It's a loss but not a crippling one for the lander's mission," Dr. Paige said of the climate orbiter's failure.

Beginning a New Invasion of Mars

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

(September 21, 1999) Two American spacecraft are approaching Mars, the second wave of economy-class robotic orbiting and landing parties in an ambitious revival of exploration of the red planet.

• Scientists Choose Landing Site for Robotic Spacecraft on Mars (August 26, 1999)

• Three Women Wait Anxiously for Their Spacecraft to Reach Mars (April 18, 1999)

MARS CLIMATE ORBITER

Two Teams, Two Measures Equaled One Lost Spacecraft

By ANDREW POLLACK

(October 1, 1999) Simple confusion over whether measurements were metric or not led to the loss of a $125 million spacecraft last week as it approached Mars, NASA said.

Mars Orbiting Craft Presumed Destroyed by Navigation Error

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

(September 24, 1999) A $125 million robotic spacecraft, the first ever dispatched especially to investigate weather on another world, was missing and presumed destroyed just as it was supposed to go into an orbit around Mars.

Spacecraft Speed to Mars, High Hopes on Board

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

(January 5, 1999) Fresh off the launching pad, two new spacecraft are heading for Mars as part of a 16-year effort to determine once and for all if life ever arose on the red planet. The two probes make up a second wave of inquiry, the first having begun in 1996.

• Climate Orbiter on Its Way to Mars (December 12, 1998)

MARS GLOBAL SURVEYER Spacecraft's Data Yield First Detailed Map of Mars

By WARREN E. LEARY

(May 28, 1999) The first global three-dimensional map of Mars, made with data from an orbiting American spacecraft, reveals a surface of extreme highs and lows sculptured by still mysterious processes, scientists said on Thursday.

A 'Bonus' From Mars: Evidence of Its Past

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

(March 9, 1999) Over the last year, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has looked down from orbit and snapped hundreds of pictures of the landscape that are 20 to 40 times as detailed as anything obtained by previous explorations. And this was not even part of the original mission plan, but an example of a constructive response to adversity.

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No Word From Mars Probe for Third Day

By JOHN ANTCZAK

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 5, 99) - NASA sounded increasingly gloomy Sunday about the chances of ever contacting the $165 million Mars Polar Lander, after mission officials using a different antenna listened in vain for a signal for a third straight day.

''Clearly the team is getting more frustrated, certainly, and more tense about all of this,'' said operations manager Richard Cook.

The lander was supposed to have signaled immediately after Friday afternoon's touchdown about 500 miles from the Martian south pole.

Instead, several windows of opportunity came and went over the weekend with no sign of life from the unmanned craft. The ever-more ominous silence raised the prospect that the lander was destroyed or severely damaged during its descent to the planet's surface.

Failure of the Mars Polar Lander would be the second major blow in recent weeks to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, still smarting from the September loss of its sibling spacecraft, the Mars Climate Orbiter.

Sunday's first communications window - designed to use a backup signal - opened at 10:50 a.m. PST and closed 10 minutes later without any transmission from the surface of the Red Planet.

The lander, if working properly, was supposed to have switched radios to relay a signal through NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor, instead of transmitting directly to Earth. But the mapping spacecraft sent only its own data and none from the lander.

Sunday's only other communications opportunity, using the original radio, was scheduled for 9:40 p.m. PST to 11:55 p.m. PST.

Lack of any signals since shortly before Friday's scheduled landing left mission officials with hope only that the little craft survived the touchdown and, on its own, was taking steps to establish contact.

Mars Polar Lander could have gotten into trouble simply by setting down in difficult terrain.

''Landing on Mars is very hard - and it's the part where you're landing that's really hard,'' said Cook. ''It doesn't take much to have problems.''

Two tiny probes designed to fall separately from orbit and plunge into the surface also failed to send signals. Sarah Gavit, project manager for the probes, said unless they were heard from by late Sunday night it was unlikely communication would ever be established with them.

Controllers continued to operate on the assumption that the landing was successful because the spacecraft was in excellent condition just prior to entry and analysis showed its trajectory was good.

Engineers have theorized that the craft set down in a position that has kept its dish antenna from pointing at Earth, or that it settled into a soft surface.

Sunday's first communication window was based on a contingency program carried aboard the lander.

The craft was designed to communicate directly with Earth through a directional dish antenna. But its programing included instructions in case there was a failure of the power amplifier for its ''X-band'' transmitter - the one intended for Earth communications.

The backup program required the lander to switch to a non-directional UHF radio in case it had not received instructions from Earth by Sunday. The orbiting Mars Global Surveyor was to listen for the UHF broadcast and relay it to Earth immediately.

NASA said that if the communications blackout continued past the weekend, commands would be transmitted to instruct the lander - if it was operational - to begin switching between redundant systems to try to signal Earth.

The lander was also programmed to keep track of how long it has been since it was last contacted by Earth, and after six days to assume there was some type of failure and begin switching between backups on its own.

AP-NY-12-05-99 2149EDT

Planetfest '99 News
Mars Polar Lander Remains Silent
December 4, 1999
NASA engineers believe that three spacecraft landed on Mars on December 3, but all attempts to contact these spacecraft so far have failed.
On Saturday night beginning around 8:30 Pacific Standard Time, the Mars Polar Lander team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California again tried to get a signal from the lander and its two microprobes, Amundson and Scott. No signal was detected.
The spacecraft was in excellent condition and right on target as it approached Mars. In fact, as Mars Polar Lander Project Manager Richard Cook explained, the spacecraft landed extremely close to the designated target area near Mars' south pole. Cook stated that the lander probably touched down "within 20 to 30 kilometers or so within the target area."
But some of the confidence is waning as time between landing and contact increases. In a press conference on Saturday night, Cook said: "As time goes by -- I'm not going to tell you otherwise -- we're less confident."
Mission leaders seem less confident about the fate of the two Deep Space microprobes. The probes might have encountered some fatal obstacles. They may have landed in a nearby crater, where the angle of entry or rocky terrain might damage the probes.
But if the probes entered the Martian soil as planned, they might have already begun autotransmitting, autonomously sending signals in an attempt to contact either the lander or the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. The autotransmission is scheduled to begin 29 and 32 hours after striking the planet.
The Mars Polar Lander team is quick to point out that many more contingencies must be explored before scientists and engineers know more about the fate of the Mars Polar Lander. The next attempt to get a signal from the spacecraft will be about 10:50 in the morning on Sunday, December 5.

Still No Word From Mars Lander

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - (December 5, 1999) For a second day, no signal was heard from the Mars Polar Lander, but NASA officials remained hopeful about another window of opportunity on Sunday.

A window for contact with the still-silent spacecraft opened at 11:30 p.m. EST Saturday. Nothing was received an hour later.

NASA sent up commands for the space craft antenna to scan the sky in search of the Earth, but officials said there would be no response possible that night.

``As time goes by, and I'm not telling you otherwise, we're less confident,'' Richard Cook, the spacecraft's operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a Saturday night news conference. ``At this point, though, we still have a lot of things we can try and we're doing that ... Everybody has the belief that we can still get a signal from the spacecraft.''

During the next opportunity, the spacecraft is programmed to automatically send signals using a different antenna Sunday morning. If the second antenna works, the transmission would first be detected by the Mars Global Surveyor satellite and relayed to Earth.

Controllers say they have not exhausted all the simple explanations for the silence, like a mispointed antenna or a computer reset. The spacecraft was in good shape and on course just before communications ended Friday morning as expected before descent.

Critics say the $165 million mission may have been in trouble even before it left the launch pad 11 months ago.

Weeks before the craft began its descent toward the Red Planet, questions were being raised about the mission and whether it might be doomed by tight budgets and understaffing.

And the embarrassing Sept. 23 loss of the lander's $125 million sibling spacecraft, the Mars Climate Orbiter, is not far from the minds of engineers and scientists at JPL, the space agency's lead center for planetary exploration.

NASA investigators later determined that engineers failed to convert data into metrics in a critical navigation program, causing the satellite to fly far too close to Mars. It's believed to have burned up in the atmosphere it was to study.

The 43-page report released Nov. 10 did not stop with the metric mix-up, however. It faulted navigators for taking short cuts and not knowing enough about the lander. It also found that too few people worked on the program, and that they were overworked and undertrained.

Investigators also reported that questions about the orbiter's trajectory raised by navigators were not relayed to other groups within the project, including the spacecraft's builders at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Colorado.

The Polar Lander's mission also came under unprecedented scrutiny because the same organizations and people who flew the orbiter were behind the latest mission as well.

Officials denied the report was an indictment of the agency's mantra of building ``faster, better, cheaper'' spacecraft to explore the solar system. They pointed to successes like 1997's Pathfinder and Global Surveyor missions.

NASA Administrator Dan Goldin said Friday the agency would stick with its approach.

``Would you rather go back and spend $2 billion to $3 billion a spacecraft and send them up every 10 years and lose one of them?'' he said. ``When we started, we said we'd push the boundaries and we'd lose some, but we haven't lost this one yet.''

If the Mars lander is lost forever, the momentum to study the planet may be diminished, said Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of several books supporting exploration of the Red Planet.

``Losing that probe is not a tragedy, but losing the will to explore is,'' he said.

The lander and orbiter that were to have explored climate history and search for water this year are part of a Red Planet campaign that launches an orbiter and lander every 26 months, when the orbits of Mars and Earth are properly aligned.

AP-NY-12-05-99 0340EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thousands Wait for Signal From Mars

By PAUL CHAVEZ

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 4, 99) - Subdued space buffs held out hope for sounds from Mars on Saturday as they passed the day at Planetfest '99, a festival timed to showcase the Mars Polar Lander that so far has failed to make contact with Earth.

Bill Miller, 60, came from Houston with his 7-year-old grandson, Aaron Fridman, to help fuel the boy's interest in science and hear what the Red Planet sounds like. The Lander's equipment included a microphone.

''I wanted to hear it, even an old engineer like myself,'' Miller said. ''But the critical thing was to stimulate my grandson.''

Up to 15,000 people were expected at the three-day event that started Friday at the Pasadena Center. The festival, organized by The Planetary Society, was held to coincide with the landing of the $165 million NASA probe. The craft remained silent Saturday, one day after it was scheduled to land on Mars.

''If we get the downlink that would be great, but a lot of people are coming anyway because of all the other activities,'' said Susan Lendroth, a spokeswoman for the non-profit group.

The Planetary Society, which was co-founded in 1979 by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, has 100,000 members worldwide. Longtime Planetary Society member Rodney Johnson, 35, came from Seattle to bring his son, Marshall Lodge, 6, to the festival.

The status of the mission left Johnson a bit disappointed, but he held out hope that scientists would make contact with the probe.

''Things like this are pretty expected,'' Johnson said. ''The only time it seems like this is when there's a lot of media focus on every event. It usually isn't in front of the eyes of everybody.''

His son sported a new Planetary Society T-shirt that he won playing a space vocabulary game called Mars Bingo.

''I like planetary stuff,'' Marshall said. ''But what I'm really into is building rovers.''

Virtual visitors also logged onto Planetfest at to check in with the guest lecturers, which included Edward Stone of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bill Nye the Science Guy and cast members from the upcoming Touchstone Pictures film ''Mission to Mars.''

AP-NY-12-04-99 1839EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NASA Awaits Word From Mars Lander

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 4, 99) - For a second day, NASA scientists anxiously hoped Saturday for a signal from the still-silent Mars Polar Lander, a craft some say may have been in trouble even before it left the launch pad 11 months ago.

Weeks before the $165 million craft began its descent towards the Red Planet, questions were being raised about the mission and whether it might be doomed by tight budgets and understaffing.

Attempts to detect signals from the spacecraft were to continue with a transmission window opening Saturday night. It has not been heard from since Friday, when it began its fiery descent toward Mars.

Mission controllers say they have not exhausted all the simple explanations for the lack of a signal, like a mispointed antenna or a computer reset. The spacecraft was in good shape and on course just before communications ended as expected before the descent.

''We're remaining upbeat,'' said Richard Cook, the spacecraft's project operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ''We have prepared for various scenarios, and we're trying all the options.''

But the embarrassing Sept. 23 loss of the lander's $125 million sibling spacecraft, the Mars Climate Orbiter, is not far from the minds of engineers and scientists at JPL, the space agency's lead center for planetary exploration.

The Polar Lander's mission also came under unprecedented scrutiny because the same organizations and people who flew the orbiter were behind the latest mission as well.

''This report was sort of a preview of coming attractions for all things that could go wrong with Polar Lander,'' said analyst John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists a week before its arrival. ''I would hope that would force them to think again whether they're trying to do too much with too little.''

Officials denied the report was an indictment of the agency's mantra of building ''faster, better, cheaper'' spacecraft to explore the solar system. They pointed to successes like 1997's Pathfinder and Global Surveyor missions.

NASA Administrator Dan Goldin said Friday the agency would stick with its approach.

''Would you rather go back and spend $2 billion to $3 billion a spacecraft and send them up every 10 years and lose one of them?'' he said. ''When we started, we said we'd push the boundaries and we'd lose some, but we haven't lost this one yet.''

''Losing that probe is not a tragedy, but losing the will to explore is. Do we go back and cease being a nation of pioneers?'' he said. ''The problem with the Mars program is that they are underfunded. ... We shouldn't be pinching pennies.''

The policy, in fact, was implemented after NASA's $1 billion Mars Observer probe vanished near the planet in 1993. Even if both this year's missions to the Red Planet have failed, the total loss is only a fraction of Mars Observer.

In the wake of the investigation report, more navigators were added to the lander project and every aspect of the lander mission was reviewed. Another concern - the cold start of thruster rockets during descent - was addressed by turning on heaters before the lander's mission began.

The unprecedented scrutiny of the project after the orbiter disaster, in fact, is one of the reasons mission controllers remain optimistic about hearing from the lander.

''There would seem to be greater cause for anxiety than they have publicly conveyed thus far, although I would not question their observation that there are several more days' worth of opportunities to hear from the lander,'' Pike said Saturday.

''They do have a whole sort of sequence of things that would allow them to establish contact,'' he said. ''They're not just whistling past the graveyard.''

AP-NY-12-04-99 1840EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

NASA Awaits Word From Mars Lander

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 3, 99) - With the minutes and hours ticking by, NASA scientists nervously awaited word from the Mars Polar Lander after it failed to promptly radio home Friday to confirm whether it had safely landed on the surface of the Red Planet.

The problem with the $165 million spacecraft could be as simple as a mispointed antenna or as serious as a crash landing or a catastrophic failure during the descent through the Martian atmosphere.

Losing it would be devastating for NASA. Just 10 weeks ago, the Polar Lander's sibling spacecraft, the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter, burned up in the planet's atmosphere because of engineers' embarrassing failure to convert navigation data into metric units.

The Polar Lander was at the end of an 11-month journey to Mars. It was designed to cut through Mars' atmosphere at precisely the right angle, separate from its heat shield, deploy a parachute and fire a dozen thrusters before setting down.

The spacecraft was programmed to slow from 15,400 mph to 5 mph just before touchdown, which was to have been at 12:01 p.m. PST. If everything had worked perfectly, the signal confirming touchdown would have arrived back at Earth at 12:39 p.m.

Instead, scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory stood around or sat looking at computer screens as crowds of other officials looked on worriedly.

''This is not entirely unexpected,'' said Richard Cook, operations project manager. ''Obviously we're a little disappointed not to see a signal at 12:39. But we were prepared for this, and we're going to go ahead and execute our plan as we described it.''

The Polar Lander was equipped with cameras, a microphone and a robotic arm with a trenching tool for a 90-day mission. The spacecraft was to capture the sounds of Mars, analyze the atmosphere and gather samples of the frosty soil, searching for signs of water and other conditions necessary for life.

One possible explanation for the delay was that the Polar Lander's computer slipped into a protective safe mode immediately after landing, in which case it would postpone its first signal to Earth, 157 million miles away.

Another scenario was that the probe lost its bearings on the way down and could not correctly point its antenna.

The Polar Lander, 3 1/2 feet tall and 2 feet wide, was to set down in a never-explored region close to the south pole, where the average temperature is expected to be minus-73. Little is known about the region, especially the consistency of the soil.

''It could be the stuff we're sitting on could be quite soft - it could be like baby powder,'' said David Crisp, one of the mission's scientists. ''It could very well be that the lander landed and just broke through the crust at the top and resettled.''

Controllers planned to send up commands Friday night to try to get a response from the spacecraft. Because of the motion of the planets, the spacecraft can be contacted from Earth only during certain periods.

''Entry, descent and landing are very complex, and a lot of things have to go correctly,'' Cook said. ''That's just part of the risk associated with the mission.''

About 2,000 space fans at Planetfest '99 in downtown Pasadena waited anxiously Friday.

''I'm disappointed,'' said Matthew McCabe, 19, of Big Bear Lake, Calif. ''But NASA has proven over and over that we should have faith in them.''

Two microprobes called Deep Space 2 also rode to Mars with the lander and were to slam into the planet at 400 mph. But no signals from those probes were expected until late Friday at the earliest.

If Friday's landings were successful, the Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 would join Mars Pathfinder and the two Viking spacecraft as the only spacecraft to explore the surface of the Red Planet.

In 1993, the $1 billion Mars Observer disappeared just before going into orbit around the Red Planet. It is believed to have exploded as its fuel lines were being pressurized.

AP-NY-12-03-99 1939EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

No Contact Made With Mars Lander

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 3, 99) - Radio signals confirming the Polar Lander's touchdown on Mars did not immediately reach Earth as hoped today, raising questions about the whereabouts of NASA's $165 million probe.

The problem could be as simple as a mispointed antenna or as serious as a catastrophic failure during the descent that was to culminate the 11-month mission to land near Mars' south pole.

One possibility was that the lander's computer slipped into protective safe mode immediately after landing, in which case it would delay sending its first signal. If that's the case, the next opportunity to hear from the probe would be 2:04 p.m. PST.

Another scenario was that the probe did not correctly predict where to point its antenna. As it descended through the atmosphere, the lander had to keep track of every twist and turn to keep its bearing.

This evening, controllers will send up commands directing it to transmit as it sweeps the sky. If successful, a signal could be picked up as early as 8:08 p.m.

A loss would be particularly devastating for NASA. Only 10 weeks ago, the lander's sibling spacecraft, the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter, burned up in the planet's atmosphere because of an embarrassing failure to convert navigation data into metric units.

The Polar Lander was designed to slice through Mars' thin atmosphere at precisely the right angle, separate from its heat shield, deploy a parachute and fire a dozen thrusters before setting down - all without radio contact with Earth.

Thousands of lines of computer code were to have mapped out every final move, with the probe slowing from 15,400 mph to 5 mph just before touchdown, which was to have been at 12:01 p.m. PST. This morning, scientists had said things were going well.

But if everything had worked perfectly, the signal confirming a touchdown would have arrived back at Earth at 12:39 p.m. Instead, navigators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sat in chairs looking at computer screens as crowds of other officials looked on worriedly.

Engineers didn't receive any signal by 1:24 p.m., the end of the first time period a signal could be received. Other time periods for signal transmission would come later in the day.

Scientists have hoped to learn about Mars' climate by studying layers of dust and possibly ice during the next 90 days. Instruments were to measure vapor in the atmosphere, while a claw on the spacecraft was to collect samples to be cooked and analyzed for water.

Early today, engineers ordered a final course correction to make one last adjustment to the spacecraft's angle of approach. Twelve minutes before scheduled landing, the probe was to turn away from Earth to position itself for entry, silencing itself until after landing.

''Entry, descent and landing are very complex, and a lot of things have to go correctly,'' Cook said. ''That's just part of the risk associated with the mission.''

The first signals - and confirmation of a success - were not expected until 38 minutes after touchdown, provided an antenna was pointed properly. If not, engineers would have several opportunities over the weekend as the lander adjusts its antenna 157 million miles away.

NASA hoped for a status report, weather readings and black-and-white images by tonight. Clearer pictures and sound clips from a microphone could be returned by the weekend. NASA hopes to relay data through the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been orbiting Mars since 1997.

Meanwhile, two tiny microprobes that rode along with the lander were to slam into the planet at 400 mph as the main spacecraft descends, their fall unbroken by parachutes or thrusters.

The first signals from the Deep Space 2 probes were not expected until late this afternoon at the earliest.

If today's landings succeeded, the Polar Lander and the microprobes would join Mars Pathfinder and the two Viking spacecraft as the only spacecraft to explore the surface of the Red Planet.

In September, the Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the planet's atmosphere because of the failure to convert navigation data into metrics units.

And in 1993, the Mars Observer, a $1 billion NASA spacecraft, disappeared just before going into orbit around the Red Planet. It is believed to have exploded as its fuel lines were being pressurized.

''It would be harder this time - if it were to happen this time - because there's nothing immediately coming along in two months,'' Cook said.

The 3 1/2-foot-tall, 2-foot-wide lander was to set down in a never-explored region so close to the south pole that the sun will not dip below the horizon during the mission. Though it will be late spring, the average temperature is expected to be minus-73 degrees Fahrenheit.

Both the lander and the failed orbiter are the latest in a series of missions that began with the July 4, 1997, landing of Mars Pathfinder to improve understanding of the planet's geology and climate history, particularly what happened to the water that is believed to have long ago cut stream beds and shorelines on the surface.

Scientists know frozen water exists on the Red Planet in its northern ice cap. But they believe there may be more underground. Today, liquid water on the surface would instantly freeze or boil away in Mars' thin, frigid atmosphere.

The Polar Lander will try to find evidence that the atmosphere was once warmer and thicker. Its landing site is believed to be an area where climate changes caused layering of dust and ice that can be read like the rings of a tree trunk.

Any answers from the probe would help focus future missions searching for past or present life, which is dependent on water, though the lander's instruments cannot detect fossils or living organisms.

AP-NY-12-03-99 1707EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mars Lander's Science Instruments

.c The Associated Press

Science instruments aboard the Mars Polar Lander:

Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor (MVACS): The main science payload includes a 6 1/2-foot robotic arm that can dig trenches and collect samples that will be tested for evidence of frozen water and carbon dioxide. The four-jointed device, which is about as strong as a human arm, is also equipped with temperature probes and a camera. Samples collected by the arm will be heated in eight tiny ovens and any gases that are given off will be analyzed by a laser. A meteorology package also will record temperature, atmospheric pressure and wind. A final instrument, called the Surface Stereo Imager, will take pictures of the surface, including a 360-degree full color panorama scheduled to be released Tuesday morning.

Mars Descent Imager (MARDI): The camera at the base of the lander will snap about 30 pictures as the probe descends through the Martian atmosphere. The experiment, which takes about two minutes, will help scientists better understand the landing site from various altitudes.

Light Detection and Ranging system (LIDAR): Russia's first payload aboard a U.S. planetary lander will fire a laser into the atmosphere in an effort to characterize any ice or dust above the surface. It's also equipped with a small microphone that will attempt to record noises from the spacecraft and the Martian environment.

Deep Space 2: Two tiny microprobes will separate from the lander's cruise ring and smash into the planet at more than 400 mph to test technologies and search for water. If the probes survive, future missions could be planned sending a dozen or more free-falling probes to different locations on Mars or elsewhere.

AP-NY-12-03-99 0956EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mars Polar Lander at Journey's End

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (Dec. 3, 99) - The Mars Polar Lander faced the greatest challenge of its 11-month journey today as it maneuvered for touchdown on the frigid, rolling plains near the Red Planet's south pole.

The $165 million NASA probe was designed to slice through Mars' thin atmosphere at precisely the right angle, separate from its heat shield, deploy a parachute and fire a dozen thrusters before setting down - all without radio contact with Earth.

Instead, thousands of lines of computer code mapped out every final move, with the probe slowing from 15,400 mph to 5 mph just before touchdown this afternoon.

Scientists hope to learn about Mars' climate by studying layers of dust and possibly ice during the 90-day mission. Instruments will measure vapor in the atmosphere, while a claw on the spacecraft will collect samples to be cooked and analyzed for water.

Twelve minutes before landing, the probe was to turn away from Earth to position itself for entry, silencing itself until after landing. Engineers performed a minor course adjustment this morning to fine-tune the final landing coordinates.

``Entry, descent and landing are very complex, and a lot of things have to go correctly,'' said Richard Cook, lander operations project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ``That's just part of the risk associated with the mission.''

The first signals - and confirmation of a success - were not expected until 38 minutes after touchdown, provided an antenna is pointed properly. If not, engineers will have several opportunities over the weekend as the lander adjusts its antenna 157 million miles away.

NASA is hoping for a status report, weather readings and black-and-white images by tonight. Clearer pictures and sound clips from a microphone could be returned by the weekend. NASA hopes to relay data through the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been orbiting Mars since 1997.

Meanwhile, two tiny microprobes that rode along with the lander were to slam into the planet at 400 mph as the main spacecraft descends, their fall unbroken by parachutes or thrusters.

The first signals from the Deep Space 2 probes were not expected until late this afternoon at the earliest.

If today's landings succeed, the Polar Lander and the microprobes will join Mars Pathfinder and the two Viking spacecraft as the only spacecraft to explore the surface of the Red Planet.

A loss would be particularly devastating. Only 10 weeks ago, the lander's sibling spacecraft, the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter, burned up in the planet's atmosphere because of a failure to convert navigation data from feet and inches into metrics units.

``It would be harder this time - if it were to happen this time - because there's nothing immediately coming along in two months,'' Cook said.

Both the lander and the failed orbiter are the latest in a series of missions that began with the 1997 landing of Mars Pathfinder to improve understanding of the planet's geology and climate history, particularly what happened to the water that is believed to have long ago cut stream beds and shorelines on the surface.

AP-NY-12-03-99 0951EDT

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By MATTHEW FORDAHL

.c The Associated Press

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) (December 2, 1999) - Pictures, weather reports, science data and even sound clips from Mars will soon be just a mouse click away.

Virtual tourists will be able to access the sights and sounds of the Red Planet beginning on Friday, when NASA's Polar Lander begins transmitting from 157 million miles away.

Internet traffic is expected to rival that of the Independence Day weekend of 1997, when the landing of Mars Pathfinder attracted a record 33 million hits a day.

``It's hard to say that it will be the Internet's biggest event ever, but it certainly will be right up there,'' said Kirk Goodall, a Web page engineer at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Faster computers should prevent Internet traffic jams that made it difficult to access sites two years ago.

For this mission, several million hits are expected in the first days after the landing near Mars' south pole, with at least 1 billion during the entire three-month mission. A hit is counted each time a file such as a graphic or text is accessed on a Web site's host computer.

In addition, Polar Lander's pages will be duplicated at 20 mirror Web sites around the world. Technology now allows browsers to be automatically redirected to mirror sites with the least traffic.

``If we have any problems, we have other mirror sites we haven't told the world about yet,'' Goodall said.

Improvements over the Pathfinder presentation also include streaming video from NASA TV, a continuously updated panorama of the operations room at JPL and a movie of the descent made up of shots made by a camera mounted at the bottom of the lander.

By Saturday, sound clips recorded from the lander's small microphone are expected to be available online from the Planetary Society, a private space advocacy group that funded that part of the mission.

Web sites offering information on Mars and the Polar Lander mission:

JPL's main Mars site will post the latest pictures and updates throughout the 90-day mission: marslander.jpl.nasa.gov or mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98

JPL's home page has links to the latest Mars projects as well as probes sent to other planets over the last 20 years. www.jpl.nasa.gov

JPL's Mars Educational site includes activities for children and teachers. In one section, pages can be printed, folded and glued to create a model of the Mars Polar Lander: marsnt3.jpl.nasa.gov/education/

The University of California, Los Angeles, where the primary science team is based, offers a site focusing on experiments aboard the Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor payload: marspolarlander.com.

The Planetary Society will mirror JPL's site and offer its own content in conjunction with its PlanetFest '99 gathering at the Pasadena Center: planetary.org

The Mars Society, which advocates human exploration of the Red Planet, will mirror JPL and offer its own content: www.marssociety.org

AP-NY-12-02-99 1959EDT

MARS MICROPHONE

TO SIGNS IN THE SKY DATABASE

TO MARS CYDONIA DATABASE

TO PLANETARY ANOMALIES - THE MARS/MOON/ANCIENT SITES CONNECTIONS

MARS EXPLORATION ROVERS
... In June, the European Space Agency (ESA) is slated to launch Mars Express,
... Beginning with today's launch of the European Space Agency's Mars Express ...
www.greatdreams.com/mars/mars-rovers.htm -

MARS LINKS - DATABASE OF MARS INFORMATION
... A high resolution image of Phobos was taken by Mars Global Surveyor from ...
Images from the Mars Orbiter Camera aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor ...
www.greatdreams.com/mars/mars-links.htm -

LIFE ON MARS? - SOUTH POLE
... SPECULATION MOUNTS FOR INTELLIGENT LIFE ON MARS. MARS. Liz Edwards has located
significant new NASA images in the south polar region of Mars. ...
www.greatdreams.com/mars2.htm -

OPPORTUNITY MARS ROVER
... In June, the European Space Agency (ESA) is slated to launch Mars Express,
... The second NASA robot on Mars, Opportunity, has already sent back ...
www.greatdreams.com/mars/opportunity.htm -

GEOMORPHOLOGY AT CYDONIA - MARS FACE
... previous geologic studies of the Cydonia region of Mars, have been ...
pedestal craters on Mars, if ejecta had been thrown on the Cliff, ...
www.greatdreams.com/geology.htm -

Nozomi - Japan Active Missions
... Its Mars probe is wandering off course. Its weather satellites are ...
Japan's highest-profile project, the Nozomi Mars probe, is due to reach the Red ...
www.greatdreams.com/mars/japan-nozomi.htm

EXPANDING UPON 'CIRCULAR BOUNDARY AROUND CYDONIA'
... his discovery of a �circular boundary� around the Cydonia area on Mars. ...
of the surface distance (arc distance) on Mars from pole to equator. ...
www.greatdreams.com/expand.htm -

THE GREAT DEBATE - CYDONIA
... a few days ago concerning this topic (Mars Revealer radio show). ... go on to
have forums about possible life-forms (leading to Intelligence) on Mars, ...
www.greatdreams.com/cydonia-debate.htm

THE CODE OF CARL MUNCK, AND ANCIENT GEMATRIAN NUMBERS - PART TWO
... across time and space ... from the surfaces of both Earth and Mars. ...
The breakthrough involving the structures on Mars happened in the very early ...
www.greatdreams.com/gem2.htm

TO MAIN INDEX