SPACE.com -- NASA Abandons Search For Orbiter


	NASA Abandons Search For Orbiter By Greg Clark Staff Writer posted: 06:24 pm ET 24 September 1999

Mission controllers of NASA's Mars Climate orbiter are planning to quit the search for the spacecraft and declare the orbiter lost

Mission controllers of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter have abandoned the search for the spacecraft and declared it lost.

Sam Thurman, flight operations manager for the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander, called off the search at 9 p.m. Pacific daylight time Friday.

"I asked our guys to make one more search around the tracking pass," Thurman said Friday afternoon, speaking of the Goldstone tracking station in the Central California desert, near Barstow. That station was in position to receive transmissions from the region near Mars until 9 p.m., Thurman said.

An official NASA announcement stated the search would be called off at 3 p.m., but Thurman said he let it continue until the tracking station passed out of view of Mars with the rotation of the Earth.

Engineers now estimate that the spacecraft passed just 35 miles (57 kilometers) from the surface of Mars on Thursday during a main engine burn designed to slow the craft and allow it to enter orbit. At that altitude, the spacecraft could not have survived, and would have been destroyed in the atmosphere. The target altitude was higher than 90 miles (140 kilometers) from the surface.

The last possible hope for the craft would be if it had somehow not entered orbit and sped right past Mars on an escape trajectory, Thurman said. The final futile hours of the search were targeted in the region of space where the orbiter would have been if it had missed Mars and kept going.

With the orbiter lost, the team's hopes ride with the Mars Polar Lander, which is also part of the two-spacecraft Mars Surveyor '98 mission. The lander is on its way to Mars, scheduled to arrive Dec. 3.

"We are going to do everything humanly possible to find out what happened, fix it, and make sure it doesn't happen to any other mission again, and pour all of our energies to making the Mars Polar Lander mission a success." Thurman said.

"It's still up there. It's perfectly healthy and we're going to get it down safely," he said.

Click here to go to space.com's Mars page

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