PASADENA, Calif. A signal any signal, no matter how small from the Mars Polar Lander could weigh heavily on what course NASA will take in its ambitious campaign to explore the Red Planet over the next decade.
The $165 million lander vanished on December 3 just as it began its descent to the surface of Mars. Since then, the spacecraft may have broken its silence twice, both times in feeble messages received by a radio antenna at Stanford University.
Although NASA had written off the spacecraft as dead, the possibility of renewed contact has energized it to continue looking. With the assistance of various giant radio dishes across Europe, NASA will cock a figurative ear again on Friday to listen for a signal from the lander.
"It would mean it reached the surface safely. That would be big stuff," said Sam Thurman, the missions director of flight operations at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "If the Polar Lander was known to have successfully completed entry, descent and landing, that would have a big effect on all the people running around trying to figure out what impact on the program it should have."
The loss of both the Polar Lander and its companion spacecraft, the Mars Climate Orbiter, earlier in September has given NASA pause in its quest to send a lander-orbiter pair to Mars every 26 months over the next decade.
Indeed, the next lander scheduled for launch on April 10, 2001 relies on a similar rocket-powered descent system as the Polar Lander to deliver it safely to the martian surface. If the Polar Lander remains silent, its unequivocal failure could force delays as well as a possible restructuring of the entire architecture of NASAs Mars program.
"A lot is riding on the possibility of this signal working out," said Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society. The Pasadena, California-based space exploration advocacy group funded a $50,000 microphone experiment aboard the lander that would have returned the first sounds from Mars.
The lander has now spent more than 60 martian days (sols) on the surface of Mars. Were the lander to muster the ability to signal Earth, it would mean not only that it survived the landing two months ago, but that it has been carrying out many of its scheduled tasks.
"Thats a pretty complicated set of jobs," Thurman said.
That would include using its solar arrays to recharge its batteries, said David Paige, the principal investigator for the spacecrafts main instrument package.
"Its quite a good fraction of the lander" that must be working, Paige said, in order for that to happen.
With a confirmed signal in hand, more headway could be made into why the mission went awry, Friedman said.
"You could start isolating what did work and what didnt," Friedman said, "which is more than we know now. It would be tremendously significant."
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