Scientists continue attempts to contact Mars Polar Lander as hopes fade

Aritist's concept of the Polar Lander on Mars

December 8, 1999
Web posted at: 4:59 a.m. EST (0959 GMT)

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(CNN) -- Though the chance of success is now slim, NASA scientists are still trying to contact the missing Mars Polar Lander, and those efforts will continue for two weeks.

Scenarios for contacting the lander are more complicated now, and even less plausible than those already tried, said Richard Cook, the spacecraft's operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The last realistic opportunity to contact the Mars Polar Lander ended Tuesday with no response from the spacecraft.

NASA chief Dan Goldin said Tuesday that the space agency will examine its entire Mars program and could delay upcoming missions.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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NASA's investigation could result in missing the scheduled 2001 launch of an orbiter and lander -- as well as delaying missions that were to bring Martian rocks back to Earth.

Meanwhile, space scientists and others were questioning NASA's push for "cheaper, faster, better" missions like the Mars Polar Lander.

"My original reaction to 'cheaper, faster, better' is that two out of three ain't bad," said John Pike, an analyst with the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists. "Pick the two of those three that you want, because you can't have all three."

In the case of the Mars Polar Lander, Pike suggested that under-funding and under-staffing may have contributed to the mission's problems.

Richard Zurek, a project scientist for the mission, acknowledged that this might be possible.

"We have to take a hard look," Zurek said in a telephone interview from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where the control room for the mission is located. "It's a matter of staffing, really: Did we try to do too much with too few people?"

Combined, the 1998-99 crop of Mars missions -- Climate Orbiter, Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 -- cost about $320 million. That's about a 10th the cost of the Viking mission that successfully landed two spacecraft on the red planet in 1976.

Back to the future

In a way, the new approach to planetary exploration is a throwback to the earliest days of the space program, says Liam Sarsfield, a space analyst with the Rand Corp.

"If you remember Sputnik and the Explorer missions, spacecraft that were less than a hundred pounds ... We are going back to that type of spacecraft -- but with higher complexity," he said.

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Some at NASA believe the agency is pushing too hard.

"I didn't realize how fast and cheap it was going to get," says Peter Smith of the University of Arizona. Smith heads the team that designed and built cameras for Pathfinder, the Polar Lander and the next round of Mars missions. He says NASA drives too hard a bargain.

"I'd love to have a zoom lens and add some extra capabilities for gosh sake, and I'm not allowed to do it."

"I think we have had enough of cheaper; let's go for a little more of the better," he said.

NASA readily admits the new missions are riskier than the old way of doing business. But when it comes to exploring the unknown a certain degree of risk is unavoidable.

"Once aspect of the new program is we've got that opportunity," JPL's Zurek says. "All the eggs are not in one basket. We have a chance to continue the program, even with failures."

Of 25 previous U.S. and Russian missions to Mars since 1962, 11 have failed and four did not complete their missions.

Correspondent Miles O'Brien, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.