PASADENA, Calif. The panel investigating the loss of the Mars Polar Lander wrapped up three days of meetings at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Thursday, making its first foray into what will be a staccato, two-month, cross-country look into the spacecrafts disappearance.

The panel, lead by former Lockheed Martin executive and Goddard Space Flight Center director, A. Thomas Young, will make at least two visits each to NASA headquarters, JPL in Pasadena, California and the Denver home of spacecraft-builder Lockheed Martin Astronautics during the course of its work.

During an interview on Thursday, Young said he expected the team would interview as many as 300 people involved with the $165 million mission.

"Everything is on the table. There are no limits to what we do," Young said, paraphrasing his mandate from NASA Administrator Dan Goldin.

The Mars Polar Lander has not been heard from since it presumably alighted on the red planet on December 3.

Ongoing efforts to image the spacecraft or its wreckage on the surface using the high-resolution camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor have proved fruitless so far, said Michael Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems, builder of the satellites camera.

Although early in the investigative work the panel must complete by mid-March, Young said that all doors have thus far been open to him and his team.

"There is no indication that anything is being kept from us," Young said. "I expect to find whatever the root cause is."

Goldin charged the panel with an examination of the budgets, content, schedule, management structures and scientific goals -- not only of the Polar Lander, but also a slew of other recent NASA missions, including the successful Mars Pathfinder and the failed Mars Climate Orbiter.

"Were looking at a family of missions that have taken place recently and developing an opinion of what their strengths and weaknesses are," Young said. "Our recommendations will be applicable to the broad robotic program, not just the Mars portion."

The back-to-back losses of the Climate Orbiter in September and the Polar Lander two months later has left NASAs ambitious Mars exploration program on tenterhooks. While the assessment team will review possibly changing the scope and schedule of NASA campaign to explore Mars -- including the possibility of a delay to the 2001 Mars lander -- Young said it was too early to say if and how this would be done.

However, he did say that there would be "big changes" to the Mars programs architecture if found necessary.

Young also defended himself from criticism that, as a retired Lockheed Martin executive vice president, he would be soft on his former employer. Lockheed stands to play a major role in the manufacture of NASAs martian spacecraft through the next decade.

"The best thing I can do and this group can do is to be rigorous and really identify any problems there might be and recommend ways to correct them," said Young, who retired from Lockheed in 1995. "If there are fundamental reasons why there are failures and they are not resolved, then there will only be more failures."

Young said the recent setbacks on NASAs road to Mars have reminded him of the good fortune the American space agency had during the Viking days.

"It was probably much more extraordinary than I realized it at the time," said Young, who served as mission director for the twin 1976 Viking Mars orbiter-lander missions.