CONTOUR Mission Status Report August 16, 2002 — 9:30 p.m. (EDT)

Next Operations: Radar and Radio Checks

Efforts to locate the CONTOUR spacecraft – through a series of
telescope, radar and radio checks – are expected to continue
through the weekend. On Monday, Aug. 19, mission operators plan to
check if CONTOUR automatically carries out a built in command to
cycle through and transmit through all four of its antennas. The
sequence is programmed to begin 96 hours after CONTOUR receives its
last command — meaning it could start as early as 4:09 a.m. (EDT) or
as late as 10:09 p.m. Monday — and would last several hours.

“We aren’t sure that the spacecraft is completely gone, and
that’s what we’re going to be working on over the next several
days,” says Dr. Robert Farquhar, CONTOUR mission director from the
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the
CONTOUR spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA.