Tidbinbilla Station still trying to make contact

"We have been in a daily search, scanning the airwaves for any signal," Tidbinbilla's spokesman, Glen Nagle, said yesterday.

"There has been a lot of speculation about what's gone wrong. It could be a computer glitch, a stuck solar panel. It could be anything."

Tidbinbilla has tried beaming up "shouts, signals at very high power, asking 'Are you still there'?" There was no answer.

Now NASA hopes to use a camera on its newest probe circling the red planet, Mars Reconnaissance, to hunt for its lost sibling.

"We can physically look to see if it's still there," Mr Nagle said.

Looking down on the Martian surface from 320 kilometres up, the camera aboard Mars Reconnaissance, which has been orbiting since March, can see objects just 29 centimetres wide. "That's like having a camera in Sydney that can see a computer screen in Canberra," Mr Nagle said.

In the next day or so, if Surveyor still exists, the orbiters should pass within 150 kilometres of each other. Reconnaissance will have only seconds to photograph Surveyor as they sweep by each other at high speed.

Mr Nagle said Tidbinbilla would continue listening for the lost explorer eight hours a day while Mars was in Australian skies.