NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin today named Arthur G. Stephenson, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL, to be the head of the Mars Climate Orbiter Mission Failure Investigation Board.

NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter is believed to be lost due to a suspected navigation error. Early this morning at about 2 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time the orbiter fired its main engine to go into orbit around the planet. All the information coming from the spacecraft leading up to that point looked normal. The engine burn began as planned five minutes before the spacecraft passed behind the planet as seen from Earth. Flight controllers did not detect a signal when the spacecraft was expected to come out from behind the planet.

Like a kid looking out of the window of the family minivan, the camera on board NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter has snapped its first look at the red planet while it was still 4.5 million kilometers (2.8 million miles) away. The image shows Mars as a tiny red “half moon” dot. It was taken on Tuesday, September 7, by the spacecraft’s color camera, one of two science instruments onboard.

A strip of gentle, rolling plains near the Martian South Pole will serve as a welcome mat when NASA’s Mars Polar Lander touches down on the Red Planet on Dec. 3. NASA unveiled the landing site, a swath of terrain measuring about 1,500 square miles (4,000 square kilometers), at a briefing Wednesday at NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.

The target landing zone for NASA’s Mars Polar Lander — a site located in mysterious layered terrain near the Martian South Pole — will be unveiled in a press briefing on Wednesday, Aug. 25.