Around noon on December 3rd, NASA's Mars Polar Lander spacecraft was to have landed on Mars carrying with it a chip designed by Silicon Engineering (now part of Creative's Advanced Technology Center). The chip - the Sensory RSC-164 - was the brains of the Lander's "Mars Microphone" which would have listened to the sounds of Mars for the first time, picking up the sounds of the Martian winds, its shifting sands, and possibly even thunder caused by dust storms, as well as the sounds of the spacecraft itself. However, the Mars Polar Lander failed to signal back to Earth on landing, and NASA engineers are still puzzling over its fate.

The Mars Microphone was built at the University of California Space Science Laboratory at Berkeley, and was integrated into the Lander's LIDAR instrument package by the Space Science Institute in Moscow. The Mars Polar Lander was launched January 3rd 1999 from Cape Canaveral, and has travelled 470 million miles to reach the Red Planet. The spacecraft will land about 500 miles from the planet's south pole in its mission to advance our understanding of Mars' current water resources and to determine how the climate of Mars has changed over time. The temperature at the landing site will be about -73F (-58C). Signals from the spacecraft will take 14 minutes to reach the earth, travelling a distance of 157 million miles at landing.

The Sensory chip, shown here, was designed at Silicon Engineering and is featured in our "Embedded Systems" page on this website. Originally designed for low-cost, low-power consumer applications as a speech synthesis and recognition chip running Sensory's neural net technology, the chip includes SEI's proprietary "SEMic" microprocessor, as well as a digital filter, an ADC/DAC and an array of peripheral circuits that make the chip a self-contained system requiring hardly any external components. Also key to its application on the Mars Lander is its low power operation, drawing miniscule amounts of current to conserve precious power on the Lander.