12.4.99 Yet ANOTHER Mars spaceship missing, presumed dead I could just SWEAR we--and I--have done this one before... just a little over 2 months ago, in fact. Come to think of it, is there ANY Mars mission undertaken in the past, say, 10 years which actually did survive and was able to implement it's intended operations? NewsHawk® Inc. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters19991204_1052.html NASA Tests to See If Mars Polar Lander Survived PASADENA, Calif. (Reuters) - Scientists on Saturday prepared tests to determine if the ominous silence of the Mars Polar Lander was caused by the spacecraft purposely turning itself off due to a minor malfunction or if the mission has been lost. "We hope this is not going to be a big deal," said Laurie Leshin, a member of the mission's science team as she insisted that engineers remained upbeat about bringing the spacecraft back to life by making the first contact since it was scheduled to land safely on the Red Planet on Friday. The three-legged, 639-pound lander failed to make contact with Earth in three attempts by NASA scientists on Friday. Asked what happened, project manager Richard Cook said, "We just don't know." Cook said he hoped the craft had gone into a "safe mode" about 20 minutes after it had made a safe landing, explaining why it had failed to call home across 145 million miles of space. He said the craft's onboard computer was programmed to go into a safe mode if one of the lander's many instruments had failed or was temporarily malfunctioning. "If it was asleep, which in essence is what happens in a safe mode, then the lander would not be able to hear us when we sent instructions," Cook said. The craft is programmed to stay in a safe mode for 18 hours and would not wake up until 6:30 p.m. PST on Saturday (9:30 p.m. EST). A WAKE-UP CALL SCHEDULED At that time, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena will send a signal to the lander asking it if it is awake and commanding it to start scanning the Martian sky until its main antenna locks on Earth. If there was to be a reply from the craft, Leshin said, it would come at about 8:30 p.m. PST on Saturday (11:30 p.m. EST). She said that if the craft was still not able to receive commands, there is a built-in command sequence in the lander's onboard computer to tell it to switch to its Ultra High Frequency antenna on Sunday night and beam signals to the Mars Global Surveyor, a satellite orbiting Mars at an altitude of 250 miles. If that succeeds, engineers can then order the craft to switch to backup systems to bypass whatever problems it has been having, Leshin said. However, if that fails, "Then it's time to start worrying," Leshin said. NASA scientists said they would continue to try to make contact after Sunday but that if there was still silence from Mars by next Thursday night, they might lose all hope for the mission. The lander has a built-in clock and if it does not hear from Earth for six days it begins swapping between main and backup systems in its onboard computer and radio and then tries to contact Earth, officials said. FATE OF MICROPROBES UNKNOWN The plight of two grapefruit-sized microprobes that hitched a ride on the lander and then deliberately plummeted to the Martian surface, striking it at 400 miles per hour, looked even gloomier than that of the lander. They have tiny, non-rechargeable batteries that could run out by Monday, officials said. The microprobes also have failed to respond to signals sent by the global surveyor. Scientists said they fear that if they do not hear anything by Monday, they will never learn the results of the experiment to learn whether delicate instruments can be protected by modern-day armor that can withstand a 400-mph impact. The microprobes blasted through the Martian atmosphere on Friday for a landing in the south polar region of the planet. The microprobes also were intended to compliment the lander in its search for water on Mars, seen as vital in determining whether the planet was ever capable of supporting life even in its most primitive forms. Water also is an invaluable resource for any future manned exploration of the planet. There were fears that America may have lost its second space mission to Mars in three months. If the lander and the two probes have been lost, it would represent a crushing blow to NASA's ambitious "faster, cheaper, better" space exploration program. The Mars Climate Orbiter, a satellite and the lander's sister ship, which was to have helped its exploration of the Red Planet by acting as a relay station from the Martian surface to Earth, was lost in September through human error when scientists mixed up English and metric measurements. Copyright 1999 ABC News
