Contact was lost with MPL on 3 December when it turned to enter the Martian atmosphere.
Nasa's efforts to locate MPL are continuing with cameras on board the orbiting probe Mars Global Surveyor scanning the planet's surface.
On December 3rd 1999, a spacecraft called Mars Polar Lander (MPL) was supposed to touch down near the red planet's southern pole.
On May 5th, it was announced that MPL had been spotted in pictures of Mars taken soon after the craft went missing.
Some are asking why the MPL did not bounce onto the surface like the highly successful Mars Pathfinder spacecraft of two years ago.
Further work is needed to prove that this is, indeed, a picture of MPL and not wishful thinking over a grainy handful of pixels.
Market research company Music Programming Ltd (MPL) said 87% of its respondents who downloaded music admitted they bought albums after hearing tracks through the internet.
Richard Zurek, MPL project scientist, described the Denver Post exclusive as "premature", and said the crater theory was just one of several scenarios still being investigated.
Nasa said the concerns relating to the cold firing of the thrusters had been publicly aired in November, almost a month before MPL reached the Red Planet.
Nasa has reacted angrily to the allegation that it knew the Mars Polar Lander (MPL) mission would fail because of a design flaw in the craft's braking thrusters.
The best hope is the satellite will be able to take pictures of the MPL's 20-metre long parachute, a big enough object to be picked out by the satellite's cameras.
It was claimed that the system used to ignite MPL's hydrazine fuel could not have coped in the extreme cold of space and that the engines were only installed in the spacecraft after an unnamed individual had falsified test data.
According to the UPI news agency, senior Nasa officials only realised the flaw in MPL's thrusters a few days before the landing was to take place on 3 December - when it was too late to do anything about it.
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