Mars probe dead

Radio transmissions from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor went silent on 5 November 2006. Three days before contact was lost, the 10-year-old spacecraft had trouble positioning the solar panels that power it. The spacecraft will crash into the Martian surface around 2040.

MGS’s primary mission ended in 2001, but the spacecraft continued to return data despite difficulties such as a broken gyroscope. An MGS paper published last month in Science reported on suspected water flow on the Martian surface. “MGS was a watershed mission,” says MGS principal investigator Michael Malin, an author of the Science paper. “The increase in aerial coverage and resolution has had a profound influence on what we now know. The results reported in our Science paper are the direct result of a long-lived mission, and would not have been possible without it.”

MGS’s successor, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, arrived in orbit three weeks before MGS went silent.