Little hope for NASA to find missing Mars space probe
by The Associated Press on Nov. 22, 2006, under Local, Nation/WorldNASA’s best efforts to find a missing Mars space probe have failed, scientists said Tuesday as they began to lose hope for the 10-year-old planet-mapping workhorse.
After more than two weeks of silence from the Mars Global Surveyor, NASA will make other tries to locate it, but scientists were pessimistic.
“We may have lost a dear old friend and teacher,” Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program said at a news conference in Washington Tuesday.
If that is true, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which the University of Arizona helped build, will become the craft that amplifies signals from two Martian rovers – one of the Global Surveyor’s main functions.
The $154 million Surveyor, managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, was supposed to last only two years but continued sending data for almost a decade. It is the oldest of six active space probes on or circling the red planet.
Among its accomplishments are more than 240,000 pictures of Mars, offering the best big-picture view of the planet. Meyer credited the probe with proving that Mars once had water.
“Every good thing comes to an end at some point,” said Arizona State University scientist Phil Christensen. “It certainly in my mind greatly exceeded our wildest expectations of what to hope for. It revolutionized what we were thinking about Mars.”
On Monday night, NASA had hoped to catch a glimpse of Surveyor from the camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But the orbiter failed to spot it.
Now NASA will try an even less likely search effort. Engineers will send a signal to the silent spacecraft, asking it to turn on a beacon on one of the two Mars rovers below. If the rover beacon turns on, NASA could figure out where the lost Mars Surveyor is, said project manager Tom Thorpe.
“While we have not exhausted everything we can do. . . . we believe the prospect for recovery of MGS is not looking very good at all,” said Fuk Li, Mars program manager at JPL. “We’re still holding out some hope.”
NASA will keep trying small-scale communications efforts. Experts believe the surveyor, which lost contact Nov. 2, probably developed a problem with a device that moves solar panels, causing it to lose communication.
The entire Mars Global Surveyor program cost $247 million, including launch expenses and a decade of in-flight operations. NASA had just approved a two-year mission extension for $6 million a year.
Launched on Nov. 7, 1996, the probe gave scientists the best topographic map of any planet in the solar system, said Cornell University astronomer Steve Squyres.
The probe gave the first detailed views of Mars’ massive dust storms and gullies. It also revealed a new mystery about Mars: It once had a magnetic field.
