Mars Probe Loss Could Change NASA’s Course

One by one, at their stations in space, the sentries of NASA’s hard-won planetary empire signaled their positions this week--from Magellan at hothouse Venus, from Galileo passing the frigid asteroid Ida, from Ulysses riding the solar wind, and from twin Voyagers at the fringe of interstellar space.

But from the one spacecraft that listeners at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena strained most to hear Wednesday--the Mars Observer--there was dead silence.

The Mars Observer did not phone home. Only the most die-hard NASA scientists still nurtured the hope that it had survived its 450-million-mile journey to the Red Planet. Space agency engineers had hoped an automatic computer program would make the lost probe, which has been out of contact since Saturday, signal them automatically.

“Unfortunately we still have no one-way communication or two-way communication or any data,” said project manager Glenn E. Cunningham at JPL, which is in charge of the mission. “Every day without communications clearly lessens our probability of success.”

The distant drama of the missing Observer unfolded this week as a suspenseful radio serial. Clusters of anxious NASA engineers, gathered around deep space receivers, waited for the climax of an episode that unexpectedly--and perhaps permanently--has gone off the air.

The impact of that silence can be measured in the hundreds of millions of tax dollars poured into the ill-fated expedition and in the human cost of the decades NASA engineers and scientists invested in re-establishing a U.S. presence on Mars.

But Observer is also the latest reminder of the growing problems of the once-proud U.S. space program. The nearly $1-billion Observer mission adds to a string of expensive space failures--the loss earlier this month of a $500-million spy satellite, then of a $67-million weather satellite, and a series of mishaps with NASA’s orbiting observatories and other planetary probes.

The $1.5-billion Galileo probe, which Saturday will pass Ida on its way to Jupiter, has a damaged antenna that will sharply curtail the scientific data it can transmit to Earth. The orbiting Hubble Space Telescope looks at the universe through flawed optics and is scheduled for repair later this year from the space shuttle, which continues to have trouble meeting a launch schedule. And the agency’s proposed space station has been plagued with engineering problems that have delayed its construction and forced several expensive redesign efforts.

In Washington, congressional strategists and private analysts suggested that NASA’s latest failure was likely to make the agency all the more vulnerable to budget cuts as Congress takes up the appropriations bill covering the space program.

Although the House passed a $14.8-billion NASA authorization bill on July 29, a proposal to keep funding for the controversial space station intact squeaked through by only one vote, 216 to 215. The measure faces uncertainties in the Senate as well.

As a consequence, congressional experts and space analysts questioned Wednesday whether NASA’s ambition has overreached its engineering competence, while the agency’s political allies tried to recalculate the high cost of spaceflight.

“I don’t believe we are getting beyond our technological capability,” said William Piotrowski, NASA’s acting director of space exploration. “We have established some very tough goals. If they were easy to meet, anyone could meet them.”

However, there is a growing conviction within NASA that once-a-decade projects like the Mars Observer are simply too expensive and too complicated to risk in the aftermath of the Cold War, when agency officials can no longer rally support for big-ticket space projects by waving the Soviet red flag in an appeal to national pride.

The space agency instead should finally abandon its post-Apollo dreams of grandeur and develop a new generation of inexpensive and more easily expendable planetary probes with more limited objectives, some agency officials and civilian analysts said.

“We put ourselves captive to one thing going right or else we lose everything,” said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.

He said that the loss of the Mars Observer project almost certainly would bolster recent moves by NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin to concentrate on smaller, less-costly projects. The space agency has proposed a “Discovery” program of small, low-cost planetary missions, and one of the first is a small Mars probe expected to be launched in 1996.

The problem, said John Pike, director of the space policy project at the American Federation of Scientists, is that “when NASA says small, they mean a billion dollars.”

The Mars Observer--one of the most expensive and sophisticated space vehicles ever built--was to survey the fourth planet for almost two years, to pick landing sites, gather weather data and fill Earth’s scientific coffers with a wealth of data. It was to pave the way for a manned expedition some time in the next century.

The lost information would be invaluable, project scientists said this week, and the exploration of one of the most enticing mysteries in the sky has been dealt a setback from which it may take decades to recover.

“I’m not happy,” said Michael Malin, who quit his tenured post at the University of Arizona to start a company in San Diego to design and operate the spacecraft’s high-tech camera for NASA. Malin worked on the project for six years. “All that’s over. Now I don’t get to use it. I am angry.”

Carl Sagan, a Cornell University planetary scientist who has actively lobbied for Mars exploration, was sanguine about the Observer’s fate.

“Something like this is inevitable if you are at the edge of new technology. We have to bear in mind that there will be failures if we aim high,” he said.

More than any other object in the solar system, Mars is a reef on which the machines men and women send to the stars have foundered. Two previous U.S. Mars probes and as many as a dozen Soviet Mars missions have failed to reach the Red Planet.

JPL flight controllers said Wednesday that they would continue to try to locate and contact the missing Observer spacecraft, even as they had to turn control of the agency’s Deep Space Network over to other planetary projects.

They continued to discount speculation that a fuel tank explosion might have caused the spacecraft to lose touch with Earth.

NASA engineers said that the probe’s tanks had been pressurized three times to perform maneuvers during the flight to Mars, but that they had been put under high pressure only once, just about the time the craft prepared to orbit Mars itself and went into a radio blackout Saturday.

Times staff writers Renee Tawa in Pasadena and Art Pine in Washington contributed to this story.

NASA’s Planetary Fleet

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena oversees a fleet of planetary probes. The Mars Observer, which remained out of communication Wednesday, is not the first to experience serious technical difficulties. Other probes have overcome technical problems to take up sentry posts throughout the solar system. Here’s a look at several of them are and what they’re doing:

MAGELLAN

Location: At hothouse Venus.

Status: Launched in May 1989, Magellan has radar-mapped more than 98% of Venus’s surface. It is completing braking maneuvers to lower its orbit for more detailed mapping later this year.

GALILEO

Location: Passing the frigid asteroid Ida.

Status: Launched in October 1989, Galileo, which has a damaged antenna, flew by Venus in 1990, and flew by the asteroid Gaspra in October, 1991. It is expected to fly by Ida Saturday and will reach Jupiter in 1995.

VOYAGER

Location: At the fringe of interstellar space.

Status: Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 toured the outer planets and are now at the fringe of instellar space where they recently detected the heliopause--the outer edge of the solar system itself--for the first time.

OBSERVER

Location: Unknown

Status: There was only omnious silence from the one spacecraft that listeners at the Jet Propulsion most wanted to hear--the Mars Observer--which NASA engineers had hoped would finally radio home Wednesday.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory