NASA Fails To Locate Missing Mars Probe

[Kor37 9]

NASA Fails to Locate Missing Mars Probe

By SETH BORENSTEIN

AP

WASHINGTON (Nov. 21) - NASA's best effort to find a missing Mars space probe has failed, scientists said Tuesday as they began to lose hope.

 

After more than two weeks of silence from the 10-year-old Mars Global Surveyor, scientists began to sound resigned Tuesday but said NASA will try again.

 

"We may have lost a dear old friend and teacher," Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program said in a news conference.

 

The $154 million planet-mapper, which was expected to operate for just two years but continued to send data for almost a decade, is the oldest of six active space probes on or circling Mars.

 

The missing probe took more than 240,000 pictures of the red planet, offering the best big-picture view of it. Meyer credited the probe with proving 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."

 

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.

 

NASA had hoped to catch a glimpse of the surveyor Monday night from the camera on the new 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 activate a beacon on one of the two Mars rovers below. If the beacon turns on, NASA could figure out where the lost probe is, said project manager Tom Thorpe.

 

NASA will keep trying small-scale efforts to contact the probe through the end of the 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, who was part of NASA's scientific review team.

 

The probe also revealed a new Mars mystery: It once had a magnetic field.

 

"It's just been a fabulous mission," Squyres said.

 

 

 

No doubt the probe is sitting in a Martian museum now..........

[krysis 2]

May be it'll come back many years from now and try to talk to our whales... or sharks... or another extinct fish.

[Kor37 9]

Or perhaps it may return looking for its creator and calling itself NOMAD....