As hope of contacting the missing Mars Polar Lander faded Monday, NASA officials prepared to confront the reality of a costly failure and the likelihood of a top-to-bottom review of the next voyage to the Red Planet.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Local scientists said Monday they were disappointed at the apparent failure of the Mars Polar Lander but hope exploration of the planet continues. “Scientifically, this was a very, very interesting and exciting mission,” said Bart Lipofsky, a professor of physics and astronomy at Brevard Community College. “It’s a serious loss.”

NASA didn’t get a signal again Sunday from its Mars Polar Lander spacecraft, as hope waned that the probe safely reached the planet’s south pole last week. Two grim possibilities remain: The spacecraft is intact but hobbled by potentially serious problems or it was destroyed in a failed landing attempt Friday.

If Mars is hiding signs of life, we might have a better chance of finding it starting today. It all depends on a spidery NASA robot probe called Mars Polar Lander, which will try to land this afternoon on gently sloping terrain near the Martian south pole.

They sit on a narrow table in Sarah Gavit’s office – rugged, ugly-looking chunks of metal that have been heated and frozen to extremes and slammed viciously into the ground. They are rejected versions of NASA’s Deep Space 2 probes currently hitchhiking a ride to the Red Planet on the agency’s Mars Polar Lander.

Bob Bonitz was standing in the open doorway of an airplane at 10,000 feet last January when NASA’s Mars Polar Lander was flung into space off a Cape Canaveral launch pad. He had intended to jump, rushing down in freefall as the rocket that carried the probe thundered in the distance, but thick clouds thwarted his plans.

Listen up – NASA’s latest mission to Mars has ears. Mars Polar Lander is equipped with a tiny microphone that will try to capture the first sounds heard from another planet.

Having lost one spacecraft at Mars last week, worried NASA officials took new steps Monday to protect a second Mars-bound probe from the unexplained navigation error that destroyed its sistership. The agency brought in outside experts to help find out what went wrong, and assigned reinforcements to the team directing the Mars Polar Lander to a Dec. 3 landing near the planet’s south pole.

Within minutes of success, a NASA mission to Mars ended in failure Thursday when a spacecraft designed to study Martian weather apparently burned up in the planet’s atmosphere.