Word: polars
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...faster, better, cheaper" strategy is complete, and all we have to show for our $300 million-plus are a few conspiracy theories, a lot of disappointed people and some heavily trafficked web sites. NASA has all but given the last rites to its latest probe now that Mars Polar Lander has for the fourth straight day obstinately refused to phone home. Couple that with the failure three months ago of its sister ship, the Mars Climate Orbiter, and you could forgive space agency officials for feeling more than a little grumpy today...
...Mars every 26 months for the next decade. The loss of two straight probes prompts questions about whether the agency isn't cutting too many corners, sending out untested spacecraft without enough built-in redundancies, and it's hoped that an investigation into the apparent failure of the Mars Polar Lander will provide some much-needed answers. In the meantime, NASA stands behind its strategy. "Would you rather go back and spend $2 billion to $3 billion a spacecraft," NASA administrator Daniel Goldin asked this weekend, "and send them up every 10 years and lose one of them?" But there...
...silence is deafening: Two days after the Mars Polar Lander was supposed to have touched down and started sending back signals from the Red Planet's south pole, and still there is no word. The possibilities: The craft could have gone into a protective sleep mode after impact, and has so far missed its window of opportunity for transmission back to Earth. It's also conceivable that the probe landed on its side, making a clear transmission path even more difficult. The possibility that NASA doesn't want to think about yet is that the craft didn't survive...
...NASA, the second time's the charm - or so it seems. On Friday, the space agency's engineers celebrated the fact that, as far as they could tell, the second of their two $100 million Martian landers didn't get lost in space. All indications were that the Mars Polar Lander enjoyed a safe touchdown at right around its scheduled landing time, 3:01 p.m. EST. But NASA failed to receive a signal from the craft during the first 20-minute communications window, beginning around 3:40 p.m. The Lander is the partner craft to the Mars Climate Observer, which...
...comes the wait for the data. By landing at the planet's south pole, the Polar Lander will be able to sample one of the likeliest spots to find traces of water on the planet, and where there's H20 there could be life. But the real fun starts Saturday, when we get a planetary first: Mars wired for sound. If everything works as planned, a small, cheap microphone placed on the lander by the Planetary Society will begin streaming the sounds of the Red Planet to a web page near you. Which if nothing else means next time...