No Answer Yet From Mars Polar Lander, But Astronomers Keep Listening For Faint Signal

In the meantime, additional radio telescopes around the world have offered their assistance in helping to confirm if the signal picked up by Stanford is from Polar Lander. The project has accepted offers of help from an array of fourteen 25-meter (82-foot) antennas at Westerbork in The Netherlands as well as the 76-meter (about 250-foot) antenna at Jodrell Bank, near Manchester, England and an array located near Bologna, Italy.

"The international community has shown a real interest in being involved in our search. We appreciate their efforts and I think it shows that Mars is something that captivates everyone's imagination," said Richard Cook, project manager for Mars Polar Lander at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.

New commands will be sent to the lander from NASA's Deep Space Network around the clock on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, Feb. 1 and 2. These commands will essentially tell the spacecraft, if it is functioning, to reset its clock and send a signal to Earth. On Friday, Feb. 4, windows will open for the antennas in The Netherlands, England and Italy to begin listening. The antenna at Stanford may also listen during these windows.

The one-way light time from Earth to Mars is currently about 16 minutes. Mars is presently about 300 million kilometers (181 million miles) from Earth.

Mars Polar Lander is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Lockheed Martin Astronautics Inc., Denver, Colo., is the agency's industrial partner for development and operation of the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.