JPL LAMENTS LOSS OF MARS CRAFT.

Byline: Lee Condon Daily News Staff Writer

Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena mourned on Monday the loss of Mars96, the ill-fated Russian space probe they had hoped would unlock mysteries about soils on the Red Planet.

Mars96, which plummeted into the South Pacific over the weekend after a booster rocket misfired, was carrying a JPL-sponsored experiment designed to test the peculiar chemical properties of soil on Mars, said Roger Bourke of JPL's Mars Exploration Office.

The experiment, which he estimated cost JPL between $1 million and $2 million to prepare, was just one of the many important projects that will not be completed because of the $64 million disaster.

Bourke said scientists at JPL are disappointed for their colleagues in Russia. Three years ago JPL suffered a devastating blow when it lost contact with its $980 million Mars Observer, its most recent Mars mission. Like the Mars96 team, JPL scientists had worked on the Mars Observer project for a decade, only to have it suddenly disappear.

``Most of us know the people involved with Mars96 on a professional basis. It's like having a friend of yours experience a death in the family,'' Bourke said. ``Our hearts really go out to them.''

The Mars96 failure came just one week after the launch of JPL's Mars Global Observer at Cape Canaveral. The Global Observer, an orbiter, is just starting a 10-year probe of Mars. On Dec. 6, JPL plans to send out the Mars Pathfinder landing craft, which will be the first spacecraft to touch down on Mars since the Viking in 1976.

It's no coincidence that all three spacecraft were slated for launch in such a small time frame, because the window of opportunity for launching missions to Mars only comes around every 25 months, Bourke said.

Mars96 was the most ambitious of the three spacecraft. The Global Observer-Pathfinder team includes just one orbiter and one landing craft. The Mars 96 included an orbiter, two landing craft and two probes.

``The mass of (Mars96) was three times the total mass of the Global Observer and the Pathfinder,'' Bourke said.

Doug Isbell, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman, said that while the agency regrets that no new information will come from Mars96, it is not relying on other countries in its exploration planning.

``We don't build in any reliance on other missions,'' Isbell said. ``It would have been nice to have the information but it's not really going to affect us.''

Charlene Anderson, director of publications for a nonprofit Pasadena organization called the Planetary Society, said losing Mars96 was a major blow to the international scientific community.

``It would have been a tremendous leap in our knowledge,'' Anderson said. ``All the countries are really working together. That's why this is such a loss for everyone.''

The disaster was especially disheartening because 1996 has been such a banner year for Mars, Anderson said. Besides the excitement over the three launches, NASA researchers announced in August that a Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica contained chemicals consistent with the one-time existence of primitive life. Other scientists have disputed the findings, but the discovery has caused a renewed interest in studying Mars.

``The greatest lure of Mars is all caught up in whether there is life there. That's the question that drives it,'' Anderson said.

But whether the Russians will continue to play a prime role in solving that mystery is still to be determined. With the demise of the Soviet Union, which made the space race a priority for decades, the Russian space program has suffered from massive funding cuts. Replacing the $64 million Mars96 will be a hardship.

``It's definitely too soon to write them off,'' said John Pike, director of the Space Policy Project at the Federation of American Scientists. ``It's not so much whether they're going to do another Mars mission, it's how soon they will be able to do it. It's a tremendous blow to their planetary science program''

While U.S. scientists today have empathy for the situation, Pike said a failure like Mars96 during the Cold War would have been a chance for the United States to beat the Soviet Union.

``Every Soviet mission that failed was one more opportunity for the American investigators to be first,'' Pike said.

The United States was able to rebuild its Mars program rather quickly after the Mars Observer disaster, but Pike said the Russian planetary scientists have fewer funding resources than when they were bankrolled by the Soviet Union. Russian scientists have had to take on other jobs in order to support themselves.

``This is really a labor of love for them. They were doing this not as a job but as an adventure,'' Pike said. ``When I was there in 1993 it looked like these guys were doing this in their spare time.''