1999: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

The fervent hopes of scientists--including these planetary experts at UCLA--for a successful landing at the south pole of Mars were dashed when the $165-million Mars Polar Lander vanished without a trace Dec. 3 as it began its descent to the surface of the Red Planet.

It was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s second failed Mars mission of the year. In September, JPL’s $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter disappeared as it began to orbit the fourth planet.

A simple but catastrophic arithmetic error--the failure to convert from English units of measurement to the metric system--doomed the Climate Orbiter. NASA engineers have yet to determine what happened to the Polar Lander.

NASA appointed a panel to investigate the Lander mishap and began to reassess its “fast, better, cheaper” philosophy of interplanetary space exploration.