“Faster, better, cheaper” is the brainchild of NASA administrator Daniel Goldin. Instead of billion-dollar missions that take decades to develop and carry dozens of experiments, the agency now launches streamlined spacecraft with modest goals, gives contractors more responsibility and exercises less oversight. The 1997 Mars Pathfinder–and its plucky little rover Sojourner–and the still-orbiting Mars Global Surveyor are two of the successes of faster, better, cheaper.
But the approach has had several high-profile failures. In September the Mars Climate Orbiter burned up just before beginning to circle the planet; controllers had mixed up British and metric units. In March, all the solid-hydrogen coolant for the Wide-field Infrared Explorer telescope was lost because designers had failed to factor in electrical surges from an off-the-shelf component. Instrument glitches and test delays kept the Earth-observing satellite called Clark from being built; Lewis, its twin, burned up in the atmosphere a month after a 1997 launch. “NASA is stretching its engineers too thin,” says one critic. In fact, the flight team responsible for Mars Global Surveyor, Polar Lander and the lost Climate Orbiter numbers about one third of those who used to be assigned to a single mission. And NEWSWEEK has learned that the navigation team on Climate Observer had wanted to fly to Denver to confer with engineers at Lockheed Martin, which built the craft, about discrepancies in flight calculations. There was no money in the travel budget.
Engineers are only beginning to brainstorm possible reasons that Polar Lander might have kept silent. It might never have deployed its parachute, in which case the Martian Antarctic is strewn with millions of dollars of hardware. Or what looked like a solid surface might be riddled with crevasses, one of which might have swallowed the lander. One engineer speculated that the lander might have sunk deep into frozen carbon dioxide–dry ice–under the dust. Alternatively, the lander might have ducked into “safe mode,” remaining deaf to commands from Earth while it recycled and rebooted its software. It was also possible that the microwave dish jammed, or couldn’t lock onto Earth. And if the lander is on a slope, then the programming that points its antenna would be wrong. The two microprobes that were supposed to burrow into the Martian ground were also AWOL.
The plight of Polar Lander would have been catastrophic if astronauts had been aboard. But while it’s easy to say that with a Mars record like NASA’s it has no business hauling humans to the Red Planet, astronauts can prevent many of the glitches that robot craft are prone to, like landing in a crevasse or on a rock. Buzz Aldrin skimmed over the moon in Apollo 11 for several minutes before finding a safe landing spot. Astronauts can also unstick antennas. Still, a failure of this mission might well drive the space program into what one engineer calls “introspection mode.” Although the flight-ops team remains upbeat, saying they can try to coax a signal from the lander for two more weeks, no news was decidedly bad news.
title: “Lessons From The Frontier” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “Peter Gill”
Over the course of the day since it had reached the planet, the Mars Polar Lander–built for NASA by Lockheed Martin–had maintained a stony silence despite ground control’s attempts to coax it into speech. So had its two companion microprobes, Scott and Amundsen, named for the Antarctic explorers. The silence from the microprobes was especially ominous; in all likelihood, they were lost for good. After the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter two months ago, the problems raise new questions about NASA’s approach to the Red Planet.
The day of the landing started in an upbeat mood. After fine-tuning their course one last time, the spacecraft’s navigators had the probes on track “a gnat’s eyelash” from the desired landing area near the planet’s southern ice cap. “The whole team is ecstatic,” said Sam Thurman, the flight-operations manager for the mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which runs NASA’s Mars missions. At this point, the lander and the two microspacecraft were all attached to the cruise stage, a support system that took care of them during the long trip from Earth.
Only 10 minutes before the journey’s end, after communication with Earth had been severed, was the cruise stage to release the three packages bound for the surface. After that the microprobes were to plummet to the surface, hitting it at 400 mph and driving their sensors a few feet into the soil to look for ice. The Polar Lander was to make a more sedate approach to the planet, with a parachute and then a suite of engines slowing its descent before it touched down.
The simplest explanation why no radio signals were received is that, for some reason, the cruise stage was not jettisoned. If so, the whole squadron was either torn apart by the atmosphere or smashed by the unyielding ground. But the silence could easily have a more complicated and less catastrophic set of explanations. Even a relatively minor software glitch could have persuaded the Polar Lander to put itself into a “safe mode” after landing–which would have meant turning off its systems for more than a day before rebooting itself and trying to re-establish contact. Alternatively, something could have gone wrong with the communications system. The antenna supposed to track Earth could have jammed, or been unable to work out which way to point. The silence of Scott and Amundsen was more worrying. Over Friday night Mars Global Surveyor made numerous attempts to get the microprobes’ mobile-phone-like radios to talk as it passed over their landing site. Because they are powered by batteries, the microprobes have to be found within three days if any data is to be retrieved.
If all three spacecraft remain silent, NASA, JPL and Lockheed Martin–which also made the ill-fated Mars Climate Orbiter–will all face searching criticism. JPL’s Mars program exemplifies NASA’s commitment to “faster, better, cheaper” missions. But as Clark Chapman, an asteroid specialist, recently pointed out in an address to the American Astronautical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences, “faster, better, cheaper” has a patchy record. In 1997 the Earth-observing satellite Lewis failed just after launch. An orbital telescope called the Wide-field Infrared Explorer lost its vital coolant earlier this year. One of NASA’s own asteroid missions, Deep Space One, failed to point its camera the right way, while another, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, will turn up more than a year late for its date with the asteroid Eros because of a problem with firing its engine.
Clearly, space missions are dangerous propositions. There’s a lot to get right, and even if everything checks out perfectly in advance, things can still go wrong. If the south polar region of Mars has hidden rocks in its apparently smooth soil, for instance, they could have sealed the fate of the microprobes and tipped over the Polar Lander. Going to a place no eye has ever seen and no radar measured is always going to leave scientists open to unpleasant surprises. That’s the nature of exploration. But it’s no excuse for poor judgment and an inability to prepare properly. Perhaps, in retrospect, it was not such a good idea to name one of the microprobes after Robert Scott. A heroic failure is still a failure.
