Nov. 21, 2006 — Attempts to locate an ailing Mars-orbiting spacecraft which provided the first evidence of past water on the planet's surface have been unsuccessful, dimming prospects the craft can be recovered, NASA managers said Tuesday.
"We may have lost a dear old friend and teacher," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Explorations Program at NASA's Washington, D.C., headquarters.
NASA on Monday used its newest Mars probe to try to take a picture of the Mars Global Surveyor, which has not checked in with its ground control team in nearly three weeks. Surveyor fell silent after a problem positioning one of its solar arrays on Nov. 2.
The sister craft Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, however, found only star-filled space when it aimed its high-resolution camera where ground controllers expected to find Surveyor.
NASA plans to make one last attempt to locate the lost probe by sending commands to have it transmit a beacon signal to another Mars craft, the rover Opportunity, which is located on the planet's surface.
"While we have not exhausted everything that we can do, we believe that the prospect of recovering MGS is not looking very good at all," said Mars program manager Fuk Li, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Surveyor was the oldest of five NASA spacecraft currently working on or around Mars.
Designed to map the planet over a single Martian year, which is roughly equivalent to two years on Earth, Surveyor's mission had just been extended for a fourth, two-year term when it fell silent.
