Unfortunately, this reminds me a bit of the wait for the Mars Polar Lander, which crashed on mars in 1999. If the initial communication fails, we have to start

Unfortunately, this reminds me a bit of the wait for the Mars Polar Lander, which crashed on mars in 1999. If the initial communication fails, we have to start hoping for automatic recovery from progressively more and more unlikely failures. For example, if the initial communication at the end of the landing fails, you hope that it's just the direct-to-Earth antenna. But since it doesn't look like Mars Express could confirm the landing, we have to hope that something prevented it from contacting that - a bad angle or something. Well, perhaps another orbiter will pick it up, or a watchdog timer will time out and fix the problem (for example, by switching to another radio, if they have one). There's no point in the flight controllers giving up hope, for the few days the batteries would last. But at the same time, the list of things that could cause the failure without destroying the lander totally grows smaller. (That being said, we now have orbiters that should be able to image the landing site, which could help diagnose the problem more quickly.)