Global Surveyor Hunts For Mars Polar Lander...12/14/99
By Andrew Chaikin Executive Editor, Space and Science
 
It hasn't been a good year for Mars missions. But one Mars probe is turning in an award-winning performance this month as "Best Spacecraft in a Supporting Role."

Once envisioned primarily as a massive photography and mapping mission, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, orbiting the planet since 1997, has stepped into a different job.

Not so surprising is the fact that the agency plans within days to use the orbiter's camera to search for Mars Polar Lander, lost at Mars on December 3.

But the role that the orbiter took on earlier this month was more unusual. As NASA struggled to contact the Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 probes, the Global Surveyor acted as a communications relay between Earth and Mars.

That role was more than a decade in the making. It began in the late 1980s, when NASA was developing the ill-fated Mars Observer probe.