Mars Observer

Mars Observer left Earth in September 1992 and reached the approach to Mars the following August. On 21 August 1993, as controllers prepared it for orbit insertion, contact was lost and never recovered. The one telling the archive holds says the probe was to survey the planet photographically, that Cydonia was among the areas it was due to photograph at the time, and that just as it moved in for a closer look NASA announced a technical malfunction and no more pictures. Researchers, the telling says, suspect the malfunction was a story invented to hide what could be the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.

What is on the record

One video from one channel, and no claimant the archive can name: the telling attributes the suspicion to researchers without saying which. There is no witness because there was nothing to witness; the event is an absence of signal. Outside the archive's holdings the explanation of record is a failure investigation board chaired from the Naval Research Laboratory, which found the most probable cause to be a rupture on the fuel-pressurisation side of the propulsion system, where nitrogen tetroxide and monomethyl hydrazine met in titanium tubing and reacted. The suspicion of sabotage did circulate afterwards, and NASA's administrator later promised that the next spacecraft over Cydonia would photograph it. Mars Global Surveyor did so in 1998.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L0, a single account, and the account names no one. The mission and its loss are documented in detail; the claim against the documentation is not. What silenced Mars Observer is a burst fuel line on the record, and that is where this page leaves it.