NASA isn’t giving up yet on the missing Mars Polar Lander. After an initial
effort failed to confirm that the lander was the source of a faint radio beep,
NASA hopes more sensitive antennas might succeed. That might mean a reprieve for
the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander programme. The agency was expected to cancel the
programme because it relied on the same design as its predecessor.
NASA wrote off the lander on 17 January after weeks of trying to make
contact. But just days later, Stanford University astronomers called to say they
had detected possible signals from the probe on…
