For now, the estimated $100 million-plus spacecraft sits -- all but finished -- at Lockheed in Colorado. Its a fate that floors Quigley, who saw the canned lander during a visit to the factory last winter.
"The goal is really to inform everyone there is a completed spacecraft sitting out there in Denver," Quigley said in an interview with SPACE.com. "Why dont we do something useful with it? Thats all were trying to do."
In many ways the lander resembles the ill-fated Polar Lander, which most likely plummeted to the surface of Mars because of a single line of bad computer code.
However, despite any apparent bad juju, the 2001 lander received a clean bill of health earlier this year, clearing it for flight.
"The return to flight team that looked at it for 2001 technically saw no reason not to fly it," said Noel Hinners, vice president of flight systems for Lockheed Martin Astronautics, in a recent interview. "You have to get over the fear of flying it."
The website, cranked out at night over the course of a year, includes images of the spacecraft, its history, copies of leaked NASA documents relevant to the cancelled mission and a petition Quigley said he hopes to forward to NASA officials.
Although the site has been up and running for only a short while -- it registered some 1,400 hits as of Friday -- the petition shows it has clearly struck a nerve among Mars enthusiasts.
"The responses have been really cool," Quigley said.
Among those who have posted messages -- supportive, for the most part -- are employees of NASA and Lockheed, as well as scientists and academics involved in the exploration of the Red Planet.
"Its just a shame to put in all that work into getting to the final point, with all the testing before launch, and then go and scrap the thing," said Peter Smith, a University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory senior research scientist, who added his own comment to the board earlier this week.
But the effort may be for naught.
Within a months time, NASA aims to make public its revised plans for the exploration of Mars over the next decade and beyond.
While the 2001 landers scientific payload will likely make it to Mars at some point, the lander itself will not.
"They are still looking at what can be used, but it wont be used in its present form," said NASA spokeswoman Dolores Beasley of the probes hardware.
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