Nasa fears worst for spacecraft

[Sonia]

The US space agency (Nasa) says the veteran Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft is probably lost and unrecoverable.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6170778.stm

[xelasnave]

Vehicle theft is everywhere I guess;) .
alex

[stephenmcnelley]

It could simply be sunning itself, taking time out to relax and recharge?

Really though i find it fascinating that some of the contraptions we send up into space last as long as they do given the severity of the space environment.
A minutes silence would be in order if it has truly kicked the old astro bucket. RIP MGS

[ving]

bugger hey. cost billions to send it up too no doubt.

[Ric]

Dang Martians, they've pinched another one. :lol:

cheers

[Outbackmanyep]

It says that they're gonna try and get rover to fetch it via UHF radio....i can see it now ...

Rover to MGS: "Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Delta Dawn whats that flower you have on? OVER!"

:P

[monoxide]

lol i just noticed the guys name in the article

"While we have not exhausted everything that we could do, we believe the prospect of recovery of MGS is not looking very good at all," said Fuk Li

i bet he thought they were calling him when they lost the signal :P

[Dujon]

Hello, Outbackmanyep, nice to see you getting stuck in.

It's only a personal view on posting but, to be honest, I'd rather see normal text unless there is some reason to stress or highlight part of it.

I guess that'll make me Mr Persona non grata or just an old curmudgeon. Nothing personal, good sir.

[Starkler]

Its lasted eight years longer than planned for, so it has 'paid for itself' a few times over.

All concerned should have a :cheers: and pat themselves on the back.

[spacezebra]

Or the Martians have run out of batteries!




Cheers Petra

[sheeny]

I found this on news @ nature this morning. Also been listening to the story on the last Starstuff podcast from the ABC.

Al.

Goodbye Mars Global Surveyor

NASA scientists may give up hope on old craft, but welcome new one.
Katharine Sanderson (http://www.nature.com/news/about/aboutus.html#Sanderson)

NASA scientists say they may have to bid farewell to a dear old friend — Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). NASA lost contact with the craft on 2 November as it was coming out from behind Mars, just five days before the tenth anniversary of its launch. The last they heard from it was a possible faint signal on 5 November.

Tom Thorpe, project manager for the Surveyor, speculates that the motors rotating the craft's solar panels got stuck. Without the panels in the right orientation, the orbiter can't get power from the Sun.

Despite bombarding the craft with more than 800 command files since 5 November in an attempt to get it to say something, the orbiter remains stubbornly silent.

But as MGS drifts off to the planetary orbiter graveyard, a new craft — Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) — has started gathering data from Mars. It arrived at the red planet in March and spent its first week taking low-orbit observations this October, producing stunning pictures of the planet — including a snap in which the Mars rover Opportunity can be seen perched on the edge of a crater.

The Orbiter was called upon to try and spot its predecessor, so that it might help to diagnose the problem; it took some large pictures with its star scanner camera of the part of the sky where mission managers thought the ailing Surveyor should be.

It will be some time before these data are fully analysed, but MRO deputy project manager Jim Erickson doesn't sound optimistic about even having seen the craft, let alone getting close enough to spot the problem. "We're not sure we've seen anything in any of the images that could be a sighting," he says.

Mapped for landing

MGS's most notable scientific achievements were to provide the first truly reliable global topographic map of the planet and to reveal swathes of the surface in far greater detail than ever before. It also provided the first analysis of Mars's ancient magnetic fields. Perhaps its most dramatic discovery was of fresh gullies in the walls of some craters and along some other slopes that seemd to have been formed by recent fluid flow.

More recently it has been helping MRO to scout a good landing spot for the next generation of Mars probes — Phoenix, due to arrive at Mars in 2008, and Mars Science Lab, which will touch down in 2010. MRO will take over this job.

Fuk Li, Mars exploration programme manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, says options for contacting MGS are still being considered and he refuses to give up all hope. But as time passes the uncertainty in the Surveyor's orbit becomes greater, making it harder to find. "The prospect of recovering MGS is not looking good at all," says Li.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's mission runs until 2010, but is expected to last much longer than that. Mars is currently circled by two other operating craft, NASA's Mars Odyssey and Europe's Mars Express. The overlap in survival between MGS and these missions marks the first time that a craft orbiting a planet (other than Earth) has passed its baton on to another.

[Outbackmanyep]

[quote=Dujon]Hello, Outbackmanyep, nice to see you getting stuck in.

It's only a personal view on posting but, to be honest, I'd rather see normal text unless there is some reason to stress or highlight part of it.

I guess that'll make me Mr Persona non grata or just an old curmudgeon. Nothing personal, good sir.
[/quote

Well, i use bold and blue cos its easy to see! :D
I use the same format on MSN and Yahoo.....its sort of a personal preference of mine, i dont use it in offence to anyone! PLUS im not all that puter-literate so i guess whats normal for me might seem not normal to other people...... Is this better???

Cheers!

[nightsky]

:rofl:

[Rez]

According to Tom Thorpe , the Project Manager for Mars Global Surveyor, the total cost of the mission so far is $377 Million.

For such a long mission and so much valuable data produced, this makes it a fairly low cost mission.

"The MGS mission was originally slated to last only one Martian year, equivalent to almost two Earth years. Its mission has been extended three times. The cost of the mission to date is $377 million, which includes the building of the spacecraft, launch and exploration, Thorpe said. The total costs of running the MGS program has dropped from $20 million a year to $6 million year. There are 20 engineers and scientists who have recently been working on MGS; ten of whom are at JPL. It has been a very economically produced program"

Rez

[Ric]

Hi Rez, most definitely value for money and it sent back thousands of amazing images.