California - The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena yesterday announced that an antenna at Stanford University had picked up an "artificial" signal which may have come from the lost Mars Polar Lander (MPL). NASA now plans to make a new attempt to contact its Mars probe, which has been incommunicado since it was lost near the red planet almost two months ago.
The attempt to contact the probe will take place this week, despite a previous NASA announcement that it considered the probe definitively lost.
"This week's test is a real long-shot and I wouldn't want to get anyone too excited about it," said Mr Richard Cook, the probe' s project manager, who on January 17th said NASA would be making no further attempts to recover the spacecraft.