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Showing Articles for: Mars Polar Lander Total Articles: 242 Newest: Jun 01, 2005 |
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NASA’s succession of Mars spacecraft failures last year was reportedly the result of government and industry mismanagement, lack of oversight and inadequate checks and balances. Those charges form the foundation of a 57-page analysis, written by an 18-person Mars Program Independent Assessment Team (MPIAT).
You don't get a Cadillac for the price of a Yugo. NASA is simply trying to make the most of the money it has. The facts as we know them: On Dec. 3, 1999, the Mars Polar Lander began descending to the surface of the red planet. And that was it. The probe was never heard from again. The spacecraft or its debris, if any exists, is lost in space or on the Martian surface, where recovery is not practical.
James Oberg of UPI claims that NASA knew there was a problem with the Mars Polar Lander propulsion system prior to the Dec. 3 landing attempt and "withheld this conclusion from the public." NASA categorically denies this charge.
NASA on Wednesday "categorically denied" a report alleging it knew in advance of a fatal design flaw in the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) that disappeared in space in December.
NASA officials are categorically denying the accuracy of media reports that have been swirling since Tuesday night, which say that NASA knew in advance that the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) was doomed, but kept it secret.
A NASA spokesman vigorously denied a United Press International article that NASA knew that the Mars Polar Orbiter was doomed prior to its December crash into Mars but kept the information from the public. Brian Welch, director of public affairs at NASA headquarters in Washington, said "we think the story is whacko in every particular."
The disappearance of NASA's Mars Polar Lander last December was no surprise to space officials, UPI has learned. Prior to its arrival at Mars, a review board had already identified a fatal design flaw with the braking thrusters that doomed the mission, but NASA withheld this conclusion from the public. The probe was lost while attempting to land near the martian south pole on December 3.
An independent review board blames the loss of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter last year on sloppy project management, a lack of agency oversight, poor communications and shortsighted engineering. To avoid similar mishaps in the future, the board called for NASA to adopt a "mission success first" approach, one in which the emphasis is clearly on the word "success."
Just months after losing a $165-million lander at Mars, NASA is now considering sending a near duplicate spacecraft to the red planet in 2002.
Engines controlling the final descent of the Mars Polar Lander might have shut off prematurely, sending the $165 million probe crashing to the planet's surface, according to a new scenario being investigated by scientists.
Engineers are looking into the possibility that a flaw in the design of Nasa's Mars Polar Lander (MPL) may have caused its engines to cut off prematurely when it was descending to the Martian surface.
Less than one month before a NASA review board is scheduled to report on the failure of Mars Polar Lander, a mission team member cautioned that the cause of the lander’s disappearance might never be known.
In a surprising development, an industry source told "SpaceDaily" Tuesday that the Failure Review Board for the Mars Polar Lander has located a fatal design flaw that is regarded as the most probable culprit in the Lander's disappearance last Dec. 3 somewhere over the southern polar regions of Mars.
However, during the actual Mars landing, the accidental setting of the ground-contact bit as soon as the legs unfolded would mean that later, when the lander cut itself loose from its chute and switched on its landing engines, it would instantly conclude that it had already landed and immediately switch the engines off again -- falling the remaining 1800 meters to the surface of Mars.
New analysis suggests that two faint signals thought to be from the Mars Polar Lander were likely terrestrial in origin, a Stanford University scientist said Tuesday. A 150-foot (46-meter) radio antenna at the Northern California university picked up the weak signals on December 18 and January 4, reviving hopes at the time that the errant Polar Lander remained alive. The $165 million spacecraft vanished December 3 after plunging into the martian atmosphere at the start of what was to have been a 90-day mission.
At first, Ivan Linscott just didn't think the odd signal amounted to much. The scientist had been using Stanford University's 15-story-tall radio telescope to listen for messages from the wayward Mars Polar Lander. But the only data he had gotten back were one or two arcs that were all but obscured amid a Jackson Pollack tableau of multicolored specks.
The latest attempt to detect a signal from NASA's Mars Polar Lander has turned up nothing so far, but radio telescopes around the world will make another try this week, engineers said.
NASA officials said Monday that yet another attempt to rouse a faint signal from the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander has failed, further dashing hopes the $165 million probe will ever be heard from again.
Giant dish antennas in Europe and North America were aimed toward Mars on Friday to begin another attempt to detect what may be a flicker of life from NASA's Mars Polar Lander. It's the largest effort to listen for a signal since Stanford University engineers announced last month that they received an extremely faint signal that could have originated from the $165 million probe.
The Mars Program Independent Assessment Team, appointed by NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, returned to JPL in Pasadena this week to continue its review of the Agency's program for the robotic exploration of Mars.
The mighty Jodrell Bank radio telescope will make a sensitive search for signals from the crippled Mars Polar Lander (MPL) on Friday - but scientists hope that journalists will keep their distance. Last week, an array of radio telescopes in Holland tried to listen for the errant Mars craft, but the posse of journalists who descended upon the Westerbork observatory to cover the story rendered the astronomers' efforts useless because of the interference from their mobile phones and satellite uplinks.
Engineers have another opportunity this week to contact NASA's Mars Polar Lander, nearly two months after the $165 million craft disappeared while descending to the planet's surface.
Mission managers for Mars Polar Lander report that radio scientists at Stanford University have not detected a signal from the spacecraft in data they collected last week. Stanford will continue to analyze the data and it is still possible that more detailed analysis might reveal a signal.
Further attempts to listen for faint signals from the Mars Polar Lander have turned up no trace of the errant spacecraft, the $165 million mission’s managers said Monday.
Managers of the Mars Polar Lander Team say a series faint radio signals captured by a dish antenna at Stanford University are offering some "tantalizing" circumstantial evidence that the spacecraft may be phoning home.
The effort to hear from the Mars Polar Lander has gone global. On Friday NASA announced it has asked the Dutch, English and Italians for help in determining whether recently detected radio signals could have come from the errant spacecraft.
In what could potentially be a stunning turn of events for NASA's Mars program, Stanford scientists will determine today whether faint radio signals being picked up by the Dish are originating from the $165-million Mars Polar Lander, which was feared lost last month.
Space scientists hope that a “whisper” from space might mean that the Mars Polar Lander spacecraft is still alive, even if it is crippled and will never perform its task of looking for water on the Red Planet.
Nasa scientists say it will be the weekend at the earliest before they know if they have made contact with the Mars Polar Lander (MPL). Hopes of finding the spacecraft were raised this week after a review of data collected by a radio antenna at Stanford University showed a blip in the information record that just might have been MPL trying to contact Earth.
After receiving weak signals that may have come from Mars Polar Lander on Dec. 18 and Jan. 4, Stanford radio astronomers are again listening for murmurs from the missing spacecraft.
A last-ditch effort to find signs of the Mars Polar Lander is underway, but it will take more than a week of analysis before members of the mission team can determine whether or not the spacecraft has tried to contact Earth, the mission's flight operations manager said Wednesday.
There’s a 50-50 chance the missing-in-action Mars Polar Lander is resting intact on the surface of the Red Planet. A key scientist on the project named those odds Wednesday, based on reports from radio telescope experts at Stanford University that possible candidate signals from the $165 million lander may have been detected. Follow-up work could verify that it is alive, but sickly.
Stanford University scientists think they may have heard a faint whistle of life from the given-up-for-dead Mars Polar Lander. Researchers will be listening for a radio signal so weak that if it were a light, it would glow no brighter than a Christmas tree bulb plopped on the Martian surface, 184 million miles away.
A mysterious radio peep — apparently from the direction of Mars — has prompted NASA to fire up a new round of tests to see if the wayward Mars Polar Lander might somehow be alive and operating, officials said today. “This week’s test is a real long-shot, and I wouldn’t want to get anyone too excited about it,” Polar Lander project manager Richard Cook said after a fresh set of radio commands were sent to Mars Tuesday.
NASA says it is transmitting new commands toward Mars amid indications that its Polar Lander spacecraft has been weakly trying to phone home. Mission managers say the radio signals, received twice in last two months, are so faint that it’s taken weeks to make them out, and they caution that their expectations are low. Nevertheless, the development has revived hopes for the luckless lander.
Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory say the Mars Polar Lander may have tried to phone home after all -- on a bad connection -- and they sent new commands to the lander Tuesday in another attempt to achieve contact with the presumed lost mission.
Since mid-December 1999, the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) onboard the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft has been taking pictures of Mars Polar Lander's landing zone near 76°S, 195°W, in hopes of finding some evidence as to the fate of the spacecraft that went missing during its Dec. 3, 1999, landing attempt. To take these pictures, the MGS spacecraft is pointed a few degrees off its normal, nadir-looking (straight down) path. The first phase of imaging was completed Dec. 24, 1999, but nothing was found. A second, expanded search was requested by the Mars Surveyor Operations Project and was begun in early January 2000.
Mission managers have decided to send another set of commands to Mars to investigate the possibility that a signal detected by a radio dish at California's Stanford University came from Mars Polar Lander.
NASA is still trying to figure out what caused the demise of the Mars Polar Lander. There are a number of possible fates: perhaps the lander malfunctioned; perhaps it was destroyed by a landing on hazardous martian terrain, or buried in a blanket of soft, deep dust. A NASA review board is expected to release its report on the Polar Lander's loss sometime later this winter. space.com's Andrew Chaikin. Executive Editor, Space & Science spoke recently with Donna Shirley, former manager for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. She offered her perspective on the failed mission. Shirley, now assistant dean of engineering at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, is also a member of space.com's board of advisors.
On Monday the last long shot efforts to contact the Mars Polar Lander were abandoned. Project Manager Richard Cook said, "The final set of planned commands were sent on Jan. 6 to place the spacecraft in UHF safe mode.
Nasa has abandoned its attempts to locate the Mars Polar Lander, which landed on the red planet last month. Mission leader Richard Cook said the MPL was definitively lost and that all efforts to trace the probe had been halted.
NASA ended on Monday a six-week, intermittent search for its latest Mars mission that was to land on the red planet's surface on Dec. 3 but instead fell out of contact minutes before touchdown.
The panel investigating the loss of the Mars Polar Lander wrapped up three days of meetings at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Thursday, making its first foray into what will be a staccato, two-month, cross-country look into the spacecraft’s disappearance.
After a month of searching, scientists from UCLA and JPL continue to look for the $165 million Mars Polar Lander and are planning for the future of the Mars program. Because of disappointing recent events, NASA is making efforts to restructure its program. After early successes completed with a new philosophy of working cheaper and faster, the program's last two launches have resulted in the confirmed destruction of one spacecraft and the disappearance of the other.
The failure of Mars Polar Lander could not have come at a worse time. NASA is plagued by funding difficulties and the tensions over the survival of individual programs that inevitably results from this. The problems of the International Space Station are of Herculean proportions and Shuttle launches are sporadic events. NASA is clearly ailing, and the impact of any further problems is magnified.
Sixteen experienced engineers, scientists and executives have been named by NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin to form the Mars Program Independent Assessment Team. The team held its initial organizational meeting at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC on Friday.
NASA's investigation into its failed Mars missions began in earnest Friday with the naming of a 16-member investigation team and an initial round of briefings at space agency headquarters. In the coming weeks, team members will travel to NASA centers and to the Lockheed Martin Astronautics facility near Denver as they analyze two failed Martian probes and other missions.
A former astronaut who flew on two of the most dramatic shuttle missions of the 1990s is among 17 members of a newly-named independent team of engineers, scientists and executives that will scrutinize NASA's program to explore Mars.
Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Thursday they knew they were proposing to set down the vanished Mars Polar Lander in a deep valley. They said they were still assessing what happened to the craft and had not determined why the Lander failed to communicate.
The ill-fated Mars Polar Lander, last heard from on Dec. 3, 1999, as it started a descent to the surface of the Red Planet, may be lying crippled in a huge crater, the chief mission scientist said on Thursday. But Richard Zurek, the Mars Polar Lander Project Scientist, said the crater theory was just one of several scenarios being considered by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) lost by Nasa a month ago may have met its end in a catastrophic tumble down the sides of a canyon almost a mile deep.
The vanished Mars Polar Lander could have tumbled down a canyon on the Red Planet, but investigators so far have uncovered no evidence supporting a single explanation for the disaster, NASA said today.
After comments from engineers inside Lockheed Martin Astronautics lighted an explosion of controversy about the loss of the Mars Polar Lander, the company publicly denied that there is any way to say what happened to the craft.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will make one final attempt to hear from the Mars Polar Lander over the next two weeks before declaring the $165-million spacecraft officially lost. JPL started sending commands to the robotic spacecraft Thursday to use its UHF antenna to contact the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor. The Surveyor satellite will then cock its robotic ear and listen for the lander for 11 days, or until Jan. 17.
The finger-pointing has begun between NASA and Lockheed Martin Astronautics over the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander. The loss of a second spacecraft within three months seems to be stressing the relationship of the once-cozy marriage between the space agency and the aerospace giant.
The vanished Mars Polar Lander probably broke apart in a canyon, The Denver Post reported today, citing scientists who suggested the landing site was the reason for NASA's latest failure. The $165 million lander was supposed to touch down Dec. 3 for a 90-day mission to analyze the planet's atmosphere and search for frozen water beneath its south pole. It has not been heard from since it started its descent after an 11-month cruise, and NASA has not offered a reason for the disappearance.
Scientists trying to track down the Mars Polar Lander reported this week that an initial search conducted last week failed to find any trace of the lost probe. Scientists at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego aimed a powerful camera on the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor at the lander's intended touchdown site, but the images it captured showed no sign of the $165 million spacecraft.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory named its own review panel to look into the loss of the Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 microprobes. The 12-member panel, led by John Casani, will examine the most probable root causes for the failure of the two missions, which piggybacked during the nearly year-long trip to their Dec. 3 arrival at Mars. The three spacecraft have not been heard from since landing and are presumed lost.
It is clear now that the Polar Lander will not be sending back signals from Mars, the red planet. Something has gone wrong. The scientists don't know what happened to the spacecraft, but a lot of us do know. The Martians got it.
NASA is likely to call off in mid-January its search for the Mars Polar Lander. The 165-million-dollar lander and two mini-probes were to have searched for subterranean ice, but have remained silent since December 3, when they pierced the Martian atmosphere near the southern polar region.
NASA's lone Mars orbiter started a photographic search for its latest lost mission at the red planet Thursday. But the scientist who designed the orbiter's camera is pessimistic about the chances of finding Mars Polar Lander, the spacecraft lost at Mars two weeks ago, on the day it was set to land.
Gotten a phone call from the Mars Polar Lander? We hear the phone isn't ringing at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, either. The $165-million spacecraft is dead -- a steaming pile of high-tech junk on the south pole of the Red Planet for all we know.
Humor: Leading theories as to why NASA mysteriously lost all contact with the $165 million Mars Polar Lander.
Flight controllers for Mars Polar Lander have continued their attempts to communicate with the spacecraft so that they can be certain they have exhausted all possibilities before they conclude their search. While a recovery is still a possibility, the likelihood of hearing from the lander is considered remote at this point. In parallel with the communications attempts, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft will start taking high-resolution images of the landing site to search for signs of the lander.
Stunned by the loss of two consecutive Mars missions, some American space scientists say NASA is setting its goals without adequate assessment of the risks. One way to help fix the problem: Consult more scientists.
Nasa scientists will continue the hunt for their missing spacecraft, Mars Polar Lander (MPL). They will use a powerful camera on board another Mars probe, which is orbiting the Red Planet, to try to locate the lost lander.
In a case of art imitating life, miniature versions of NASA's three most recent Mars spacecraft are missing -- from the toy shelves. Surrounded by rumors, the "Hot Wheels 'JPL Returns to Mars!' Action Pack" may emerge as one of the most difficult to find products this holiday season.
NASA plans within days to begin using the Mars Global Surveyor to make a concerted effort to locate the Polar Lander, just two weeks after the $165-million martian spacecraft vanished.
Today was supposed to be "Sol 7," another full Martian day of work for the visitor from Earth - its robot arm digging, its eyes scanning the horizon, its microphone ear listening for the whisper of frigid wind. Instead, Mars Polar Lander is lost along with a companion satellite that was supposed to have parked itself in Martian orbit 10 weeks ago, taken pictures of the landscape and relayed the data back home.
It’s the saddest toy story ever this holiday season. In a single Hot Wheels "Action Pack," Mattel Inc. is marketing toy models of NASA’s three latest failed missions: the Mars Climate Orbiter, Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 microprobes.
The Mars Polar Lander (and its two small piggyback Deep Space-2 probes) have all failed, and without sending any telemetry back which could identify the cause of the failure.
SOMEWHERE in the cold desolation near the south pole of Mars, apparently oblivious to the frantic efforts of earthlings to contact it, there is a lost spacecraft. Barring some stroke of remarkable luck in establishing contact, we may never know what went wrong on the Mars Polar Lander.
Failure shows how hard it is to explore space. Night after sleep-deprived night, NASA scientists crowded into tiny Room 225, the Mars Operation Center at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and scanned the skies for overdue signals from the wayward Mars Polar Lander.
NASA to examine entire Mars program, could delay future missions. Though the chance of success is now slim, NASA scientists are still trying to contact the missing Mars Polar Lander, and those efforts will continue for two weeks.