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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Opportunity listened for Mars Global Surveyor, but heard nothing

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After the failure of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's attempt to capture an image of Mars Global Surveyor, the next Mars spacecraft to offer its services was the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which listened for Mars Global Surveyor's relay antenna last week. I just got an email from Mars Global Surveyor Project Manager Tom Thorpe confirming that Opportunity's efforts to hear Mars Global Surveyor were unsuccessful.

Rats.

I asked Thorpe for an update on their next steps for the recovery efforts, and he sent me a detailed reply, which I'll post in its entirety:

No signal was seen from MGS over the weekend and neither of the MER overflights yielded a detectable signal. Another attempt will be made in a few weeks using Spirit once its power profile permits a second pass, since the sun comm/sun stuck modes are synchronous with orbit egress, and hence so are the rover opportunities. (The time separation between the two Opportunity overflight start times is approximately 1531 minutes. This separation is very close to 13 integer orbits of 118 minutes (1534 minutes).

Investigations continued with the STL over the holidays simulating the spacecraft response if a sun stuck gimbal fault happened early in an eclipse period. This was done to characterize the response if the spacecraft didn't see the sun for a period of time while first transitioning to sun stuck gimbal. A series of new sun comm azimuth targets (+120 to -120 degrees from +X direction) are in preparation for uplink on Wednesday. These orientations cover the possiblity of unfavorable transmitter pointing and provide gimbal movement to free SAM panel without jeopardizing the current panel sun elevation orientation.

The Mars Express Project has agreed to image MGS for the purpose of updating the trajectory and providing an explanation why the HiRISE missed the spacecraft a week ago. Encounter opportunities (<1000km) occur every other day during December. With an unequivocal image of MGS/trajectory update in hand, a second MRO attempt might
then be requested.

Fault tree work continues.