MPL Communications is the umbrella company for the business interests of Sir Paul McCartney. In addition to handling McCartney's post-Beatles work, MPL has also become one of the world's largest privately-owned music publishers through acquisition of numerous other publishers.
MPL, which stands for "McCartney Productions Limited," is based in London and New York.
MPL's primary goal was to deploy a lander and two penetrators (known as Deep Space 2) on the surface of Mars to extend our knowledge on the planet's past and present water resources.
MPL was to have performed its mission simultaneously with that of the Mars Climate Orbiter, which would have acted as a communications relay during its surface operations.
MPL itself comprised a bus section (for power, propulsion, and communications during the outbound voyage) and a 290-kilogram lander that stood 1.06 meters tall on the ground.
MPL, with the two DS2 probes, was launched on 3 January 1999 for arrival at Mars on 3 December 1999.
The failure scenarios for MPL are presented in Section 6 and those for DS2 are presented in Section 8 of the full Report* submitted as part of this testimony.
Data from MPL engineering development unit deployment tests, and Mars 2001 deployment tests showed that a spurious touchdown indication occurs in the Hall Effect touchdown sensor during landing leg deployment (while the lander is connected to the parachute).
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