Jan 17 2000
From The Space Library
NASA declared an end to its attempts to contact Mars Polar Lander, which had descended to the Red Planet's surface on 3 December 1999. The planned 90-day mission had derailed when mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) were unable to communicate with the probe after it landed. Investigators had methodically tried different commands to reach Lander. Meanwhile, scientists and amateur space enthusiasts alike had offered a wide range of hypotheses concerning the cause of Lander's silence, speculating that Lander had exploded before actually reaching Mars's surface or that it had simply sunk in the Martian dust. After exhausting all means of contacting the probe, NASA had declared the US$165 million mission concluded, indicating that future missions would attempt to make up for the loss of Polar Lander. Project Manager Richard A. Cook expressed his sense of closure about the decision to stop investigating the matter: "we feel somewhat complete in the sense that we did go through the things we thought were reasonable ... we gave it a good shot.”
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
