Living on Martian Time

NASA Unable to Establish Contact with Mars Lander," read the December 4 headline of The Los Angeles Times. There on the front page ran a color picture of project scientist Aileen Yingst'91, eyes closed, hands clasped to her chest as she waited for any sign that the Mars Polar Lander was safe. "It looked like I was praying," she says, "but really I just blinked. And I have this nervous habit of holding onto my necklace, a silver-dollar heirloom that I was wearing for the occasion." Thing's didn't look so bad at that point.

But five days later, the craft was certified AWOL. "My team invested years of our lives into this mission," she says. "To get all the way to the finish line and be denied the prize is a terrible blow to all of us. It's especially hard for all of us to constantly have to defend the type of work we do. With a mission failure, it makes it that much more difficult."

Yingst, a geologist at the University of Arizona, was hoping to get data from the Polar Lander to crack the Mars mystery: Where did the water go?

"We have a lot of evidence, geologically speaking, that there once was water on Mars," she says. "We believe some of it is trapped in the polar caps, but there may be a great deal below the entire surface of the planet. That's what we were looking for."

Using a robotic arm, the lander was to have taken microscopic images of the polar soil. Pathfinder, the 1997 craft that landed on Mars, yielded some information about Martian soil, but no craft has ever landed in the polar region.

"Pathfinder also had some communication problems, but it was only a matter of the antenna being flaky. So nobody was devastated when we first didn't make contact with Polar Lander, but ugh," Yingst says, "it was very disappointing. The wait was the hardest part."

While she calibrated instruments and prepared for the landing, Yingst lived on Martian time's 24-hour, 37-minute day. Crash-landed back to Earth time, Yingst is analyzing Pathfinder data while waiting for the next Mars mission—whenever that may be.

Yingst had hoped the Mars Polar Lander would discover water.