You may have heard: NASA has lost contact with the Mars Global Surveyor, an orbiting space probe that has been mapping Mars since 1997. It’s been many days since they had contact with the orbiter, and things aren’t looking so good right now. As usual, Emily Lakdawalla has the news, as well as updates.
Let’s hope they can fire it back up soon.
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Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic, and fights misuses of science as well as praising the wonder of real science.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
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November 16th, 2006 at 2:52 am
I’m surprised that NASA or sombody hasn’t fitted out these probes with “Locators”, you know the ones that are used to find car keys when they are “mis-placed”. Press the button and it starts beeping.
Oh, hang on a moment, one can’t hear beeps in space. Well I guess its back to the drawing board.
Ivan.
November 16th, 2006 at 3:56 am
It would be cool if Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter could capture images of Mars Global Surveyor and perhaps reveal what’s wrong. If MGS were shown to have become situated so as not able to receive commands from Earth, it would be very cool if MRO could somehow relay Earth commands over to MGS – but that’s an idle thought and likely not in the cards.
November 16th, 2006 at 5:01 am
Chip: That’d be if MRO was anything close to MGS. It’s not quite easy sounding to me.
I hope they find it back.
November 16th, 2006 at 6:03 am
At nearly 10 years, they can’t say they didn’t get their money’s worth out of it in any case. At least it didn’t thud into the planet on orbital insertion.
Seriously, 10 years of exposure to cosmic rays and whatever radiation there is out there must play havoc with the electronics. IIRC, Mars doesn’t have a protective magnetic field like the Earth, or it’s field is much less than the Earth’s.
November 16th, 2006 at 6:15 am
I recall that one of the Mars orbiters (MRO?) already has imaged one of the other orbiters recently. Considering the relative speeds involved (10, 20 km per second?) that is really incredible. But I don’t expect it to show more than a little white dot, let alone an image that reveals anything about MGS’ troubles.
If MGS will not be recovered, let’s not feel too sad about it. This little piece of machinery has survived for 10 years and has fullfilled one of the most succesfull planetary missions ever.
November 16th, 2006 at 6:21 am
“We lost our Martian rocket ship, the high paid spokesman said”
Jimmy Buffet
Damn, I hate when he is right all the time…
November 16th, 2006 at 8:19 am
NO!!!!!
I was literally just about to submit my request for public use of the MGS camera!!!
If I believed in prayer, I would be on my knees now. Please let them re-establish contact!
November 16th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Chip/Michelle – NASA is going to try to take photos of MGS using MRO to see how its oriented (e.g., toward the sun for power and toward the Earth for communications). They’re also going to try sending a signal from both Spirit and Opportunity.
November 16th, 2006 at 11:36 am
As I understood it, the MArs Global Surveyor has to have line of sight to comunicate with earth. If the onboard gyros are shot, that’s probably the end of the road. If it’s just a loss of stellar orientation, maybe we can regain contact by resending commands until random movements on the MGS bring its reciever enough in line to earth transmission to allow it to resync with us?
Hope, Hope!!!
GAry 7
November 16th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
This is a test of Internet Explorer.
GAry
November 16th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
OK, well, that didn’t fix the regex string error either. I noted that when posting to the site from work, I don’t get those errors. Thought it might be because they use IExplorer, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem either. Oh well, back to the drawing board,,,
G7
November 16th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
Gary – Maybe we could get another desktop to image your internet provider from a distance to check its orientation – (just kidding). Anyway, if you place a post here and then see a string of error lines, assume its OK and just “go forward” and hit the URL and re-log onto the Bad Astronomy homepage. You’ll then see your posting without repeats.
November 16th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Come on everyone, we all know NASA’s orchestrating this so it can use the orbiter to gather information on The Face and its surrounding city! Haven’t you been listening to Hoaglund?
November 16th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Leon,
As usual, Hoagland is wrong about that too … everyone KNOWS it’s not a city …
It’s an Alien spa and resort.
*sheese*
November 16th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
IT IS? Well, what’re we waiting for on this drive to colonize Mars? Umbrella drinks await, man!
November 16th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Wrong again. Martians hate umbrella drinks!
November 16th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Well, nuts to them then. They’re probably too woosy to drink beer or whiskey either. We’ll just have to enslave them to serve us at the resort.
November 16th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
“Bring me another beer, ectbkawxie! And swing those hips a little more this time. When’re you gonna get some decent gravity around here anyway?”
November 16th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Is it a coincidence that MGS disappeared during the Mars conjunction when communications were difficult or could this have contributed to the problem?
November 16th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
According to Tom Thorpe, MGS project manager (as copied from the “update” article the BA posted above)
“The event that would seem on face value to be most likely to trigger a problem — solar conjunction — did not even affect Mars Global Surveyor as much as it affected all the other Mars spacecraft.
“Unlike other spacecraft,” Thorpe says, “we’ve been through five solar conjunctions and we never stopped transmitting data through solar conjunction. We did not have recorder playbacks, but we have a real-time mode where camera images or other science data could be transmitted. [This time] we did turn off the camera during solar conjunction, but the other science instruments were on and sending data each day for about 10 hours. Even on the day of closest ray-path approach to the Sun [October 23], we were getting data from the spacecraft. We didn’t try to command it, but even though the data was noisy it was interpretable and useful, so we never lost touch with the spacecraft all the way through solar conjunction.” The first loss of signal occurred on November 2.”
November 19th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
Heard something about this on my local TV news. Apparently the Tidbinbilla array (the dish in “The Dish” ) that brought us all the Lunar landing coverage is going to help out by trying to find the MGS’ signal …somehow.
November 21st, 2006 at 6:47 pm
Hey all…stumbled across this board as I was looking up info on MGS. I work at the Deep Space Communications Complex at Ft. Irwin, CA. We track MGS daily here and have been since it launched.
Just to keep ya posted, we still have negative signal detection with MGS. Sad indeed. Anyway, finger are crossed and we’ll see I guess…