Mars Lander almost certainly lost 8212; NASA

The glum admission capped one of NASA8217;s darkest moments. The Lander8217;s sister ship, the Mars Climate Orbiter, was lost due to human error in September, and the two probes that accompanied the lander to the Red planet also failed to call home acirc;euro;ldquo; adding up to a 265 million loss for the latest Mars mission.

In what scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said was a last-gasp attempt to get the Lander to call home, the Mars Global Surveyor satellite orbiting the planet tried in vainshortly after midnight 8 am GMT to hail the craft for six minutes but was met with a stony silence. While flight engineers said there were still faint hopes that the Lander might respond later in the week, they conceded that at this point they had no idea whether it was sitting on the surface badly damaged or in ruins.

During the past four days, the optimism that pervaded the control room, even when the spindly Lander failed to signal that it was safely on the Martian surface.