Official News - page 7

REAL LIFE NEWS: MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR OUT OF CONTACT

by Hazed

NASA engineers have been trying to re-establish contact with the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has been out of touch with Earth for several weeks now. It could be the end for mission - but actually it's amazing it's lasted this long!

MGS was launched in November 1996 and was intended to spend a Martian year (that's a couple of our Earth years) studying the planet's surface. It carries a powerful camera and during its ten years in operation has provided thousands of images and has scoped out potential landing sites for future explorations, as well as discovering features which suggest water once flowed freely on the planet's surface.

Now, it may be on its last legs. A motor component controlling one of its two solar arrays appears to have malfunctioned, which has resulted in the spacecraft going into a power-saving safe mode by turning so that the array faces the Sun. Unfortunately, this movement may have brought the craft's antennas and transmitters out of alignment with Earth, so now it isn't receiving commands sent to it from Earth - or at least, it hasn't replied with confirmation that they have been received. Eventually, the spacecraft will follow its programming and change its position so one of its low-gain antennas is pointing at Earth, but if that means putting one solar panel in the dark, the remaining panel isn't going to keep poor MGS alive for very long.

MGS is one of four spacecraft orbiting the red planet - the others are NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbit and Mars Odyssey and the European Space Agency's Mars Express. Controllers of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are going to try to photograph the MGS so engineers may be able to figure out what's wrong from the picture. Even if they can see what the problem is, nobody knows if they will be able to fix it, so this could be the end for the spacecraft that has already lasted five times as long as it was supposed to.

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