What Happened to the Mars Polar Missions?
Author’s note: After much deliberation, I have decided not to include any names in the following article in part to protect the innocent, but mostly because you would have no clue who I was talking about. It was only this last Friday. I was sitting at my desk in Longmont, 67.8 miles away from the control center and my old desk, thousands of miles away from the current location of the Mars Polar Lander. I had to watch a live broadcast from CNN over the net, where the people moved in a jerky fashion a half-step behind the sound. The image was of the JPL control room, a dead place compared to what the Lockheed Martin control room must have been as the engineers were busy getting ready to perform health checks on the Lander the minute telemetry was obtained, the ACE busy talking with the DSN stations to prepare for lockup on the first possible chance. You would think that all of this Mars hullabaloo would seem so far away to me now that I had left that life behind. But the minute I heard t
