That would be a devastating setback for the agency's ambitious program of sending a lander and an obiter craft to Mars every 26 months. The failure of another $100 million probe just months after the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost as a result of the now-infamous metric mixup could mean an entire rethinking of NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" strategy, and threaten congressional support for the whole Mars project. Already the criticisms have begun: That scientists were lulled by the easy success of the Pathfinder mission into launching a much less adaptable probe that needed everything to go just right in order to succeed. But the agency isn't conceding anything yet. "When we started, we said we'd push the boundaries and we'd lose some," NASA administrator Dan Goldin said late Friday night, "but we haven't lost this one yet."
Mars Lander, Phone Home... Please
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The silence is deafening: Two days after the Mars Polar Lander was supposed to have touched down and started sending back signals from the Red Planet's south pole, and still there is no word. The possibilities: The craft could have gone into a protective sleep mode after impact, and has so far missed its window of opportunity for transmission back to Earth. It's also conceivable that the probe landed on its side, making a clear transmission path even more difficult. The possibility that NASA doesn't want to think about yet is that the craft didn't survive the landing, perhaps burning up in the atmosphere or breaking up upon impact.