The Little Spaceship That Could

The Mars Global Surveyor is in trouble. The little spaceship was launched to Mars on 7 November 1996. On its' 10th birthday its guardians at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory of C.

I.T. had a busy and frustrating time.

The Surveyor is the oldest of 5 spacecraft sent to Mars. Originally NASA had planned for it to orbit our little, red neighbor for two years. NASA has continued to extend those deadlines.

In October of this year it again gave the robot spaceship another extension.






The Mars Global Surveyor has stuck around beaming its' information back to Earth, "Hello, Houston," longer than any other human artifact sent to Mars. Therefore, we are not surprised that it sent back "more information about Mars than all earlier missions combined.

" The persevering little ship has been around long enough to see two more orbiters arrive -- Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.


The tells me that,

Mars Global Surveyor has found many young gullies apparently cut by flowing water, discovered water-related mineral deposits that became a destination for NASA's Opportunity rover, mapped the planet topographically and examined many potential landing sites on Mars.

On 2 November Surveyor began a normal maneuver to move its solar panels.

One of its' motors suffered some error and systems ended up putting it in "safe" mode -- "...

a pre-programmed state of restricted activity in which it awaits instructions from Earth." Only one weak signal has been heard from it since.


Friday, 17 November, NASA was reported by to have enlisted the aid of one of those two, new orbiters, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the most powerful probe ever sent to mars, in the effort to save Surveyor.

Reconnaissance has scanned the area where Surveyor may be in an effort to locate it. Since it seems to be waiting to receive a signal telling it to point one of its' redundant transmitters toward Earth, finding it could help get it a clear signal. It will be next week before the scans can be read to see if Surveyor has been found.

JPL's description of The Little Spaceship That Could tells of a vehicle that is about 10 feet (3 meters) tall and, when it has its' solar panels deployed, it is 40 feet wide. It weighed 2342 pounds when it was launched but has lost some weight over the years unlike some people I know. It was put together with some spare parts from an earlier spaceship, the Mars Orbiter.

They describe Surveyor as built partly from surplus parts --

To minimize costs, spare units left over from the Mars Observer mission were used in portions of the spacecraft's electronics and for some of the science instruments. The spacecraft design also incorporated new hardware - the radio transmitters, solid-state recorders, propulsion system, and composite material bus structure-and retains many backup and redundant features of the original Mars Observer design in case of failure of critical elements such as the primary processors, recorders or transmitters.

The probable culprit in the loss of our little Surveyor is connected to its' antenna and communications system These are a "1.

5-meter (59-inch) diameter high-gain antenna dish that sits at the end of a 2.0 meter (6.6 foot) long boom attached to the propulsion module.

" One of the two functions is for Surveyor to receive command programs from Earth that tell it what it should be doing for up to the next 7 weeks. When she is receiving her command programs, command sequences are delivered at about 500 bits per second.


The antenna system's other use is to transmit data to Earth.

It does that at 8.4 ghz on the X-band -- that's 84000 on the FM dial. It sends its' signal at 25 watts.

By the time it gets to this planet the signal has so little juice that, , explains, "it would take 30 million years to store enough charge to run a wrist watch for one second."


The receivers are called the Deep Space Network, a set of 112 foot in diameter receivers from Spain, Australia and the Mojave Desert. A big ear to listen for a little ship.

When I was very young, perhaps only 4, long, long ago in a galaxy right here around us, my favorite record (a big, breakable thing that ran at 78 rpm) was The Little Engine That Could. It had a simple book with pictures of the little engine with his determined look and brave action. When the time came that he was needed to save the day, that small engine everyone had laughed at, said "I think I can.

I think I can" and then, after a long struggle to get up the hill, he did.


Here we go 54 years later and millions of miles away in the cold, dark night of space. A little spaceship is lost.

He can't hear his programs from Houston nor say, "Copy that, Houston." The other, newer spaceships are looking for him because he has been such a brave spaceship, paving the way for them and looking after the robot rovers down on Mars.


It is time to forget the jihadists and bomb-makers, the killers and killer-storms and send up a shout of hope for the little spaceship that can.

We hope he can. Earth needs a 10 foot tall hero pretty badly right now.