traveled through the atmosphere. You couldn't see it in real time, but after you did some processing you could see it bounce and roll as it hit the ground. The beacon was there primarily to let the team know that it made it to the surface. If something screwed up, at least they knew that they made it to the ground.The Mars Lander did not have a similar beacon and as it hit the atmosphere, we lost transmission, and we never heard from it again. Nobody knows what happened,or whether it got all the way to the surface.The same sort of beacon on the Mars Lander would have eliminated a whole set of possibilities. The Mars Lander managers considered a beacon,but their investment criteria were to maximize mission success, so they didn't put it on because the beacon just reports facts; it wouldn't help the mission be successful. The beacon can help only the next mission. So, because the beacon wasn't on the Mars Lander, we don't know how to prevent something similar from happening again. The project managers were thinking about project success,not program success. Unable to learn from the Mars Polar Lander, Mars program officials would not attempt a powered descent to the Martian surface for many years. The 2003 Mars mission would employ the successful 1997Pathfinder descent method,which utilized parachute sand airbags.