[meteorite-list] Mars Global Surveyor Hunt Narrows

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_5158669,00.html

Surveyor hunt narrows
Search for Mars craft focuses on likely position of orbiter
By Jim Erickson
Rocky Mountain News
November 21, 2006

The search for NASA's missing Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft continued
Monday, more than two weeks after the Colorado-built craft went silent.

Engineers at the space agency and at Lockheed Martin last heard from the
10-year-old orbiter Nov. 5 and aren't sure of its exact location.

But they calculated its likely position and on Friday took a snapshot of
that star-filled chunk of space using a wide-field camera aboard another
Colorado-built probe, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Friday's picture revealed two faint points of light that are definitely
not stars. One of them might be the missing Global Surveyor, said
Richard Zurek, MRO project scientist.

Or both could be electronic "noise" produced by the MRO's star-tracker
camera, he said.

"There were two possible candidate detections," Zurek said Monday. "But
we couldn't confirm that they were Mars Global Surveyor."

On Monday, MRO zoomed in for a close-up of the two unidentified objects.
This time the team used MRO's powerful, Boulder-built HiRISE camera,
along with a device called the context imager, Zurek said.

Results from that effort will be announced today.

A detailed picture from HiRISE could provide information about Global
Surveyor's orientation and its likely status.

Built in Jefferson County by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Global
Surveyor was launched in November 1996. It is the oldest of NASA's three
Colorado-built Mars orbiters and has returned more information than all
previous missions to the Red Planet combined.

Three days before the final Global Surveyor radio transmission was
received, the spacecraft reported problems with the motor that moves one
of its two solar arrays.

The solar array problem may have triggered a protective response on the
spacecraft.

It may have entered a power-saving "safe mode" by turning one or both of
the arrays toward the sun, said Tom Thorpe, Global Surveyor project
manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.