Hopes for Mars Craft Crash Again

The Mars Polar Lander is officially lost--again.

Hopes were raised late last month that the probe had signaled Earth--and a worldwide flurry of activity began to listen for and decode radio transmissions from space--but NASA officials have once again given up their search for the errant spacecraft.

Stanford telescope operators thought they had detected a faint signal that could have come from the lander in January. But a detailed analysis of the data indicates that the signal probably originated on Earth.

Additional attempts made Feb. 8 with telescopes in the Netherlands and Italy and at Stanford yielded no signals.

Ivan Linscott, the Stanford radio astronomer who first detected the signal, said Wednesday that he is now quite confident it came from Earth. He refused to speculate on what could have caused the UHF signal, but had said in a previous interview that television broadcasts are one source of such signals.

Project leaders had remained cautious as they searched for signs of the lander and said it was unlikely that the new signal had come from the lander. Still, they had been quietly hopeful.

“We saw something in the Jan. 4 data that had all the earmarks of a signal, and we felt we had to check it out,” said Richard Cook, who manages the project from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Informal efforts to listen for the lander may still occur, but Cook called any official attempts “unlikely.” Time for finding the lander is also running short. The craft had a mission life of 90 days; 65 of those have elapsed.

The $165-million probe was officially declared lost Jan. 17, more than a month after it was last contacted during its descent through the Martian atmosphere. New signals reported the week of Jan. 24 rekindled hopes that the craft was ailing but alive.

With no signal since the landing attempt, it is unclear if the craft crashed, burned in the atmosphere, lost its course or landed safely but could not contact Earth. NASA officials said it is now unlikely they will be able to determine the lander’s fate.

Future Mars missions still hang in the balance. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration panel is examining the loss and will soon determine if an orbiter and lander similar to the ones lost in December should be launched in 2001 or if the technology should be overhauled and launch delayed until 2003.