Above Mars, $125-Million Craft Vanishes

Heartsick NASA engineers strained for some whisper of hope from a missing weather satellite at Mars on Thursday, all but convinced that a last-minute navigation error caused the $125-million spacecraft to disintegrate in the Martian atmosphere.

“We have a serious problem with the Mars Climate Orbiter and we may in fact be facing loss of mission,” said Carl Pilcher, NASA’s science director for solar system exploration.

A preliminary analysis left mission managers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with little doubt that the orbiter had performed properly during its rendezvous with Mars early Thursday but that human error had plunged the spacecraft too deeply into the Martian sky, where friction from the planet’s tenuous atmosphere either broke it apart or burned it up.

“A significant navigation error occurred,” said JPL project manager Richard A. Cook, who was overseeing the orbiter rendezvous with Mars. “It looks like something was wrong with the ground navigation. We are, to put it bluntly . . . surprised.”

Mission engineers at JPL in Pasadena and Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver lost contact with the spacecraft about 2 a.m. Thursday just as its main engines started firing to begin orbiting the planet. Cruising at 12,300 mph, the spacecraft disappeared behind Mars as programmed and then, so far as anyone has been able to tell, never reemerged.

The mishap comes as NASA is fighting a billion-dollar congressional budget cut, struggling to maintain international support for the space station, and scrambling to rehabilitate its aging fleet of space shuttles, all which have been grounded while serious electrical problems are corrected.

As its budgets have declined, NASA has tightened its belt to do more with less, launching about 20 space science missions in the last two years in a program of faster, cheaper and smaller space probes. Some space analysts wondered whether the suspected navigation error is evidence that agency engineers, designers and mission managers are on the verge of burnout.

“This [navigation error] is not the way that things normally go wrong,” said John Pike, space policy director at the American Federation of Scientists. “Agency-wide, they have gone through downsizing and you always worry when that happens whether you have too much work and not enough people.”

Other space program analysts discounted the role of overwork and budget cuts in Thursday’s incident. The greater risk of failure is an unavoidable consequence of NASA’s more frequent space science missions, one expert said.

“Accepting that increased risk is part of the deal,” said John Logsdon, director of the space policy institute at George Washington University. “If indeed you have failures, it is not acceptable to then turn around and use them to kill elements of the space program.”

As best as JPL engineers could determine, the spacecraft had actually been slightly off-course for days, caused by either a software coding error or a more human miscalculation.

By the time the rockets were fired, the satellite was astray, and the thrust apparently sent it as close as 37 miles from the planet’s surface, 56 miles deeper than planned and miles too deep to survive, JPL officials said.

JPL mission engineers had no inkling that their position plots were wrong. Until it disappeared, “we believed we knew where the spacecraft was. That’s why we are so shocked,” Cook said.

It was the second time in six years that NASA lost a spacecraft just as it reached Mars. In 1993, the Mars Observer vanished as it pressurized its fuel lines prior to orbiting the planet.

Even as they sought to regain contact with the climate orbiter Thursday, JPL engineers moved speedily to ensure that the same navigation mistake does not doom a second spacecraft, the Mars Polar Lander, already en route to the Red Planet for a landing Dec. 3.

The lander and the orbiter were designed to work together in a $327-million exploration of the planet’s climate history, weather and water, project scientist Richard Zurek said. Initially, the orbiter was to relay transmissions from the lander at the Martian north pole to Earth before beginning its own methodical, two-year study of the planet’s atmosphere and seasonal weather patterns.

Even without the orbiter as a relay station, NASA officials are confident that they will be able to receive all the scientific information gathered by the lander.

JPL controllers can use an antenna on the lander for direct communications. If that signal is not strong enough, the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor could be used to relay the data to Earth.

Even so, there is no hope--at least for the near future--that NASA will be able to duplicate the weather mission lost when the climate orbiter disappeared.

Acknowledging human error as a likely suspect in the orbiter’s destruction, project officials at JPL insisted that overwork was not at fault.

“I personally have never seen any evidence of burnout,” said John McNamee, Mars ’98 development manager at JPL. “We have limited the number of hours people work specifically due to that concern.”

Project manager Cook agreed. “Everybody believes we have an adequate number of people to fly the missions. There is the question of why the navigation error occurred,” he said. “We are committed to finding the source of the problem.”

To that end, NASA formed a special team to investigate the failure, even as exhausted mission managers continued to search the radio bandwidths for some emergency signal from the spacecraft.

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Mars Orbiter Lost

The Mars Climate Orbiter lost contact with Earth and may have disintegrated or broke apart as it entered Mars’ orbit early Thursday. The $125-million orbiter, which was to gather data on atmospheric conditions on Mars for two years. Here’s what happened:

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1. About 2 a.m. PDT, orbiter fired its main engine to slow the 1,387-pound spacecraft from 12,300 mph to 9,840 mph to allow it to go into orbit around Mars.

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2. The orbiter passed behind Mars as planned, but controllers could not regain contact with the spacecraft.

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3. Tracking data showed a serious navigation error. The orbiter was off course on a trajectory that took it too deep into the planet’s atmosphere.

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Source: NASA; JPL; Researched by JULIE SHEER/Los Angeles Times