In words and somber tones usually associated with a death in the family, engineers and scientists said Tuesday that Mars Global Surveyor, the most durable spacecraft ever to orbit that planet, had fallen silent and was given little chance of revival.
The 10-year-old spacecraft — which mapped the Martian surface, recorded seasonal and annual climate changes, and gathered evidence of water in the planet's past — has not communicated with flight controllers since Nov. 2. A disabled solar power array is the prime suspect.
"We may have lost a dear old friend and teacher," said Michael Meyer, chief scientist for Mars exploration at NASA. Meyer spoke at a news teleconference from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where the mission is being directed.
Fuk K. Li, the laboratory's Mars program manager, said the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the newest spacecraft to explore the planet, drew blanks in several attempts Friday and Monday to make a photographic inspection of the Global Surveyor.
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Given that failure, mission officials said Tuesday that they had exhausted the most likely means of re-establishing radio communications.
The two spacecraft regularly pass within 60 miles of each other. But in the last three weeks, ground antennas have not been able to track the Global Surveyor's orbit to fix its probable position, which could have been altered by the malfunction.
Engineers said they planned a long-shot effort to communicate with the spacecraft through one of the two roving vehicles still operating on the Martian surface.
This week, flight controllers will radio a command for the Global Surveyor to use its transmitter to send signals that could be picked up by the rover Opportunity. Any message would be relayed to Earth through yet another spacecraft, Mars Odyssey.
Global Surveyor was launched on Nov. 7, 1996, and reached Mars orbit the next September. The craft was designed to operate for a minimum of one Mars year, or 25 Earth months. It kept going for almost five Mars years.
