Looks like the aliens are not to blame. The below describes a fatal design flaw. Enough of rocket science reality, now back to Eno and Deep Blue Day. http://www.spacer.com/spacecast/news/mars-polar99- 00f1.html Cameron Park - February 16, 2000 In a surprising development, an industry source told "SpaceDaily" Tuesday that the Failure Review Board for the Mars Polar Lander has located a fatal design flaw that is regarded as the most probable culprit in the Lander's disappearance last Dec. 3 somewhere over the southern polar regions of Mars. According to our source, the flaw is remarkably simple -- and involves the simple "ground contact" switch system designed to turn off the Lander's landing rocket motors the moment one of its three landing legs touched the Martian surface. After its initial high-speed entry into the Martian atmosphere, the Lander's planned sequence of events was as follows: At about 7.3 kilometers above the surface, while the Lander was still moving at about one-half km per second, it would have deployed its 8.4-meter-wide parachute, which would substantially further slow it, but which -- in Mars' faint wisp of an atmosphere -- would be unable to slow it below about 80 meters per second.
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Looks like the aliens are not to blame. The below describes a fatal design flaw. Enough of rocket science reality, now back to Eno and Deep Blue Day. http://www.spacer.com/spacecast/news/mars-polar99- 00f1.html Cameron Park - February 16, 2000 In a surprising development, an industry source told "SpaceDaily" Tuesday that the Failure Review Board for the Mars Polar Lander has located a fatal design flaw that is regarded as the most probable culprit in the Lander's disappearance last Dec. 3 somewhere over the southern polar regions of Mars. According to our source, the flaw is remarkably simple -- and involves the simple "ground contact" switch system designed to turn off the Lander's landing rocket motors the moment one of its three landing legs touched the Martian surface. After its initial high-speed entry into the Martian atmosphere, the Lander's planned sequence of events was as follows: At about 7.3 kilometers above the surface, while the Lander was still moving at about one-half km per second, it would have deployed its 8.4-meter-wide parachute, which would substantially further slow it, but which -- in Mars' faint wisp of an atmosphere -- would be unable to slow it below about 80 meters per second.