LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A spacecraft hurtling toward Mars for a Dec. 3 landing is not afflicted by the same metric conversion problem that caused a sibling probe to vanish as it arrived at the Red Planet last month, mission controllers say.

Reviews of the Mars Polar Lander's position also indicate it is on course for its 90-day mission to search for evidence of water, Richard Cook, the spacecraft's operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said Thursday.

The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost Sept. 23 just as it was starting to circle the planet. It likely burned up or broke apart in the Martian atmosphere that it was supposed to study, controllers said.

Investigators said last week that a failure to convert navigation data from English units used by one group of technicians to the metric system used by a different team most likely caused the failure.

Meanwhile, mission navigators are scrambling to reprogram command sequences for the lander's arrival. The lost orbiter was supposed to serve as a communications relay between Mars and Earth.

The lander's antenna will be used for a direct link between the two planets. And the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been orbiting the planet since 1997, also can be reprogrammed to act as a relay satellite.

Cook insists that no data from the lander will be lost because of the Climate Orbiter's absence. The information, however, will dribble back to Earth at a slower rate than had the probe arrived safely.