The Polar Lander has been incommunicado since late Friday, and officials said they were running down a checklist of possible causes for the communications failure.

"We're sprouting new ideas as we go along," said project manager Richard Cook at a press conference late Saturday.

Cook conceded however that "as time goes by, we're less confident" of ever being able to contact the Lander and two smaller probes that have been equally silent.

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had hoped that the 165-million-dollar Polar Lander would signal that it was safe and sound shortly after its landing Friday on the Red Planet.

The Lander and its companion mission, the Deep Space Two probes, are thought to have touched down near Mars' south pole Friday afternoon but never called home. Cook said, however, that scientists had not given up all hope of reestablishing contact.

"There are still a lot of things we can try" he said.

Sam Thurman, flight operations manager for the mission, said it could take "several days to work through all the possible contingencies," before declaring the mission a loss.

Thurman insisted they would persevere, although the painstaking process could prove "trying on people's patience," he said.

NASA scientists said the communications problem could be the result of a misdirected main antenna on the Polar Lander. That glitch could be resolved Sunday when the probe uses a different, broader antenna to communicate with a satellite, the Mars Global Surveyor, which would relay information back to Earth.

Another possible scenario is that the computer on Polar Lander sensed a technical problem and shut down around 20 minutes after landing Friday, officials said.

NASA scientists said they were all the more baffled by the glitch because things had been going so well until contact was lost.

"It was well within the capabilities of the guidance system of the landing gear to bring us down safely," Thurman said.

Until the cause of the malfunction is sorted out, engineers on Sunday continued to listen round-the-clock for the Lander's faint radio signal, which could be picked up by any of three antennas in California, Australia or Spain.

The technical problems are a blow to the US space agency, which was eager to have a successful mission after the loss in September of the Mars Climate Orbiter, because of a human error in calculating distances.

Following more than 24 hours of frustration, engineers sought to put the best face on the setback. Thurman hailed the accuracy of the spacecraft landing, which was within about 10 kilometers (six miles) of NASA projections -- an accomplishment Thurman described as "remarkable."

"We got very, very close to the target site we were after," he said.

Equally frustrated were the scientists working on the Deep Space Two project.

Sarah Gavit, a scientist with the project, said they had tried to reach the two mini-probes every two hours over the past day, and said they would continue to do so over the next 48 hours.

"The team's working hard right now and we're going to continue to keep trying," Gavit said.

The Mars Polar Lander and the 30-million dollar Deep Space 2 were launched together on January 3. They flew to Mars' south pole to look for water and gases trapped in the Martian soil.

Copyright 1999 AFP. All rights reserved. The material on this page is provided by AFP and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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