NASA is likely to call off in mid-January its search for the Mars Polar Lander, a probe launched on December 3 to look for signs of water on the Red Planet.
"Chances of recovering the Lander remain remote," National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement Wednesday.
The 165-million-dollar Mars Polar Lander and two mini-probes were to have searched for subterranean ice, but have remained silent since December 3, when they pierced the Martian atmosphere and landed near the southern polar region.
"Team members plan to continue looking for a signal from the Lander through mid-January, and at that point they will be in a position of having exhausted all possible recovery," the Pasadena, California laboratory said.
The Lander was scheduled to touch down on Mars at 2015 GMT on December 3, completing an 11-month journey across some 757 million kilometers (470 million miles). It should have made its first contact with earth by radio signal 24 minutes later.
Instead, space engineers on the ground heard neither from the Lander nor from Deep Space 2 (DS2), the mini-probes Amundsen and Scott, despite trying to make contact with them during a number of "windows of opportunity."
Photos taken of where the Lander should have landed by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 1997 have shown no signs of the probe.
JPL space engineers had been closely monitoring the probe following the loss in September of another craft, the Mars Polar Orbiter, which officials believe crashed after it was sent on a wrong orbit due to a miscalculation.
