Spacecraft

PASADENA, Calif. -- Concern over the fate of the Mars Polar Lander deepened yesterday, after flight controllers failed repeatedly to receive radio signals from the craft on the planet's surface and were forced to fall back on alternative tactics in an effort to re-establish communications.Though mission officials emphasized that they were not giving up, they conceded that their chances of success would be decreasingly slim if they don't hear from the robotic spacecraft in a test today. That's when the lander, following instructions programmed in its computer, is supposed to relay a radio transmission through another spacecraft, the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been orbiting Mars since 1997.

Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the San Francisco Examiner, which was published Friday.STRUGGLING MATH students warned us the metric system would never fly in this country, and it looks like they were right.It turns out that the recent disintegration of the Mars Climate Orbiter is being blamed on a mix-up about measurements.One team working on the spacecraft used familiar-as-old-shoes feet and inches. The other team's calculations were based on the metric system.The never-ending competition between meters and feet added up to a $125 million mistake.

They met at a formal ball in northern France. He was a boyishly handsome French engineer, she a pretty blond American exchange student.After a yearlong courtship, they married and went to Morocco for the Peace Corps.Almost 20 years later, a few things have changed. Now Doreen and Pat Cappelaere live in Ellicott City, coach soccer for their three daughters and work in a faceless Columbia office park.But the excitement and romance of their early days isn't gone; it just comes in the thrill of running their own company.

DENVER -- Pieces of the future Mars exploration program -- circuit boards, solar arrays, graphite frames and propulsion nozzles -- were laid out in the high bay of Lockheed Martin Astronautics like an incomplete puzzle, open to revision and recrimination.Here in this cavernous spacecraft assembly room, five Lockheed technicians are building a Mars lander nearly identical to the $165 million probe that vanished on its approach to the Red Planet earlier this month -- all but certain the spacecraft on which they labor so diligently will never be launched.

During the next 10 years, some Maryland scientists will be sending a spacecraft to the broiling planet Mercury, while others blast a comet with an 1,100-pound bullet.NASA gave the green light this week to Messenger, a $286 million proposal to send a robotic spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury in 2009.The orbiter would be built and managed by the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel.The space agency has also approved Deep Impact, a $240 million project to study the composition of Comet P/Tempel 1.University of Maryland scientists will send a spacecraft toward a July 4, 2005, encounter with the comet, then blast it with a high-speed copper projectile.

The Maryland-built NEAR spacecraft is back on track for a rendezvous with the asteroid Eros.But scientists at mission control in Laurel say it will arrive a year behind schedule and short of fuel after the unplanned shutdown of its main engine on Dec. 20.The fuel shortage may shorten the time available for scientists to study Eros.The engine failure has been blamed on a computer programming glitch, which scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel say has been fixed with new computer instructions radioed to the spacecraft.

Controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab regained contact yesterday with the asteroid-bound NEAR spacecraft, more than a week after an unexplained computer glitch sent it into protective hibernation."

PASADENA, Calif. - Listen, the rocket scientists told the toy makers, to what's going up into the big sandbox we call space:* A spacecraft packed with aerogel - a kind of frozen smoke - to capture stardust from the heart of a comet dubbed Wild 2.* An orbiter and probe bound for Saturn to peer at the planet's Hula Hoopish rings.* A dragonfly-shaped spacecraft, Deep Space 1, headed for a rendezvous with an asteroid.Now, wouldn't those make great toys?Forget the alien-zapping Tasers, the "Beam me up, Scotty" activators and the time-traveling hatches.

Racing to turn lemons into lemonade, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab scrambled yesterday to build a new mission for their NEAR spacecraft after a rocket failure Sunday canceled plans to orbit the asteroid Eros on Jan. 10.Instead, NEAR (for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) was being reprogrammed to snap 500 photos of Eros as it flies by beginning at 1: 43 p.m. today.It will then reconfigure for another attempt to orbit the asteroid the next time it comes around the solar system, in May 2000.

It's back.NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft, built in Maryland and launched toward the Asteroid Belt almost two years ago, is zooming back toward a close encounter with Earth early tomorrow morning.The $108 million, 1,800-pound NEAR is returning for an energy boost and a course change toward its ultimate target, the asteroid Eros.It will also take snapshots and movies of Earth and calibrate its instruments as it soars within 333 miles of its home planet.Along the way, NEAR will be maneuvered to reflect flashes of sunlight onto more than a dozen U.S. cities, giving millions of Americans a chance to see an interplanetary spacecraft as it zips around the solar system.

A little more than half of scientists' planned observations during the Messenger spacecraft's flyby of the planet Mercury were lost Tuesday when the probe sensed a problem, shut down its scientific instruments and went into "safe mode." The $426 million mission remains on track to enter orbit around Mercury in 2011, scientists said Wednesday. But much of what they had hoped to learn during the last of three scheduled flybys will have to wait for that orbital phase. "It isn't the outcome everyone expected or wanted," said Eric Finnegan, systems manager for the mission.

Darren Hitt's work really is rocket science. But forget about blinding flames and thundering engines generating millions of pounds of thrust. The Baltimore native is working on propulsion systems built on silicon chips that would generate thrust in tiny puffs of steam. They're the kind of thrusters NASA will need to maneuver a new fleet of 10- or 20-pound "nanosatellites" - spacecraft no bigger than beach balls. His research team at the University of Vermont's School of Engineering in Burlington just received a $750,000 grant to advance development of the technology.

The moon will drift into NASA's cross hairs again Wednesday as the space agency prepares to launch two new spacecraft to search for the best places for humans to land when they return as early as 2020. One of the two will crash its rocket booster into a polar crater, then fly through the debris plume to scan for water ice. The second, conceived and built in Maryland, will orbit the moon for at least a year. Its goal is to find safe landing sites with the water and sunshine needed to help sustain a permanent manned base.

Planetary scientists in Maryland should have a trove of never-before-seen views of the planet Mercury on their computer screens today. NASA's Messenger spacecraft flew within 124 miles of the sun's nearest neighbor early yesterday, and scientists at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory near Laurel were expecting the first high-resolution photographs to arrive from the spacecraft today, beginning shortly before 2 a.m. Already yesterday,...

Alliant Techsystems Inc. has been named to a team with a $70 million contract to build an emergency propulsion system for the next-generation spacecraft Orion that would allow the crew to separate from the rest of the craft in the event of an emergency. The contract will create 50 jobs in Maryland, most of them at the company's plant in Elkton but also some in Baltimore and Cumberland. ATK employees will build the "attitude control motor" for the launch abort system that will allow the crew capsule to separate and land safely under its own power.

Available: Deep Impact and Stardust. Older model spacecraft, already in orbit. Only a few billion miles on them. Big science! Huge markdown! Well, NASA liked the pitch. The space agency has decided to reactivate the two semi-retired comet-hunters and reassign them to two more comet flybys. Deep Impact will also turn its instruments on some gigantic planets circling nearby stars, and back toward Earth to see what a living planet looks like from a distance. The two mission extensions announced this week will cost no more than $55 million, according to NASA officials.

June 30 1936 Gone with the Wind was published. 1971 A Soviet space mission ended in tragedy when three cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 11 were found dead inside their spacecraft.

James Ludlow Decker, a retired aeronautical engineer who helped design the Gemini spacecraft and who served as a deputy manager for the Apollo space program in Houston, died Dec. 27 of complications from a stroke at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. The Baldwin resident was 83. Born in Batavia, N.Y., Mr. Decker moved to Baltimore after graduating from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1945. He took a job with Glenn L. Martin Co. in Middle River, where he oversaw the aviation company's aerodynamics staff and preliminary design engineering.

WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. -- Faulty software and a balky computer on a simulator in New Mexico delayed the launch of two satellites from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore yesterday. Officials weren't sure when they would know enough about the problems to reschedule. "At the very best, we would launch Thursday morning. But that's optimistic," said Col. Samuel McCraw, mission director for the U.S. Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center. "There's a lot of analysis that's going on."

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA delayed today's scheduled landing of space shuttle Atlantis for at least a day after onboard cameras showed what looked like a piece of debris drifting away from the spacecraft. "We saw something," said shuttle program manager N. Wayne Hale Jr. at a news briefing yesterday. "The question is, what is it?" Atlantis' crew will perform a five-hour inspection of the outside of the craft today, using the shuttle's remote arm, equipped with a television camera. If the inspection turns up no damage, Hale said, it is likely the shuttle will be cleared to land tomorrow.