19931776 Club
Three days from Mars, Mars Observer goes silent
The spacecraft was set to switch on its transmitter for orbital insertion; it never called home.
Mars Observer had spent eleven months crossing 450 million miles to become the first American spacecraft to reach Mars since the Viking landers. At 01:00 UTC on August 21, 1993, controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with it, just three days before it was due to fire its engines and settle into orbit. Engineers waited, then tried again. Nothing came back. The $813 million mission, built to map the planet's surface, atmosphere, and magnetic field for a full Martian year, never reached orbit…
