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…

“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.”