JPL, Pathfinder Experience Communications Glitch Again

Communication broke down again Sunday between the Mars Pathfinder and Earth, leaving mission controllers wondering what’s wrong.

The last signal from the lander came back at about 4:20 a.m., weaker than expected and bearing little data. No signal at all was heard during a session three hours later.

Officials, however, said they were not worried--yet.

“Hopefully, [the lander] is sleeping peacefully and dreaming happily of its time ahead, when it will be talking again to its creators back here on Earth,” said Brian Muirhead, project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He added: “We here need to be patient to let this thing play out. We know the press and public are very interested. But this stuff takes time. This is a really delicate operation . . . and we have to be sure we do everything carefully.”

Muirhead said what little information controllers did get was reassuring. It confirmed that both the lander and the Sojourner rover were undamaged, and that Sojourner remained safely stationed near a whitish rock nicknamed Scooby Doo.

Scientists had been hoping Sunday to retrieve pictures, rock analyses and a weather report from 125 million miles away that they missed Saturday because of a misconfigured antenna on Earth.

The latest problem, Muirhead said, could be related to that antenna. Or, he said, it could be something more complicated on Mars.

Because of limitations on communications with the lander created by the rotation of Mars and other factors, scientists simply have not been able yet to “fully assess the problem,” Muirhead said.

“Right now we don’t know enough about what’s going on.”

He went on: “I kind of liken it to talking to my grandfather, who’s kind of far away, and knowing he’s not feeling well but not being able to fully assess how he’s doing because I can’t spend enough time with him on the phone.”