Posted on 05/09/2005 6:13:26 PM PDT by mathprof
Five and a half years after it descended into the Martian atmosphere and was never heard from again, the Mars Polar Lander may have been found.
Photos taken from orbit by another NASA spacecraft, the Mars Global Surveyor, show a white dot - presumably the lander - within a dark gray oval apparently created by blast marks in the soil from the lander's rocket engine.
About 1,300 feet away is a white blob that could be the lander's parachute. The site falls within the 40-mile-long, 10-mile-wide ellipse near the Martian South Pole where the Polar Lander was expected to end up.
"The location of the candidate parachute with respect to the lander is consistent with the slight west-to-east wind seen in dust-cloud motion in the area around the time of the crash," wrote Dr. Michael C. Malin, president of Malin Space Science Systems, which operates the Global Surveyor camera, in an article that will appear in the July issue of Sky & Telescope.
The site was first suggested in 2000, but Dr. Malin said that the success last year in photographing the landing sites of the Opportunity and Spirit rovers led him to take another look at the images of the Polar Lander site, taken in 1999 and 2000.
The white blob is of similar brightness to the Opportunity and Spirit parachutes, which were made of similar material, and similar blast marks were also seen at those landing sites.
The photographs support the findings of an investigation panel that concluded that the deployment of the landing legs during descent had fooled the Polar Lander into thinking it had already touched the ground, leading it to shut off its engine while still about 130 feet in the air. In Mars' lighter gravity, the resulting fall was equivalent to jumping off a four-story building on Earth - enough force to break the spacecraft but still leave it largely intact.
"It was only a few short moments before touchdown that disaster struck," Dr. Malin wrote.
The disappearance of the $165 million Polar Lander on Dec. 3, 1999, and of the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter three months earlier, threw NASA's Mars program into disarray.
A review of the Mars program found that NASA had taken "faster, better, cheaper" too far, trying to finance both the Polar Lander and Climate Orbiter for about the same amount as the successful Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997.
The Global Surveyor team plans another pass over the Mars Polar Lander site later this year, hoping to confirm the speculations using a technique in which the spacecraft swivels as it passes over. That enables the camera to remain pointed at the target longer and improves the resolution of the images by a factor of three.
The Mars Lander crashed because the scientists behind the mission were using both the metric system and the US system for measuring distances. So the spacecraft turned out to be much closer to Mars than thought (due to using kilometers as opposed to miles).
If you think you're 30 feet from a vehicle and you're actually 15 feet away, it might be too late to put on the brakes and you might crash.
NASA is a failure.
Wrong.
That was the Mars Climate Orbiter lost because of the conversion business. The Metric-English conversion problem had nothing to do with the loss of the Polar Lander, the subject of the article.
The whole program is a failure? Because of this one problem? Wow.
I guess we shouldn't try hard things, just in case we might make a mistake, huh?
But if we find the tires have been stolen off the lander, we need to rethink the intelligent life on Mars thing.
I just wish we could send pictures back of the American flags planted in the martian soil.
LOL!!
Hmm... all along I was told it was aliens destroying our craft so we would not see their weapons they were planning on attacking earth with and ravish our women. .
Does this mean we get our tax money back, since promised services were not provided?
On a visit to the Jet Propulsion Lab Sheila Jackson Lee (D - TX) asked if the Mars Pathfinder had taken a picture of the American flag planted there in 1969 by Neil Armstrong.
Yes, the same Sheila Jackson Lee who charged the national weather bureau with racism for not giving hurricanes 'traditional' black names like Tyrell and Shamikweea.
Too accurate for Sand People. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.
"Sheila Jackson Lee (D - TX) asked if the Mars Pathfinder had taken a picture of the American flag planted there in 1969 by Neil Armstrong."
What a maroon. LOL
We can spot a parachute on Mars, so why can't we take a picture of the American flag on the Moon?
I don't want a picture of the flag on the moon.
I want a picture of the flag that Neil Armstrong planted on Mars...
We already have pictures of it, taken by the guys who put it there.
Accidental discoveries like grease smeared on a camera lense, floor sweepings dumped in to systems, etc.
Wouldn't surprise me if one or both of the failed Mars missions were somehow compromised.
Of course, there's always the "GGG", the "Great Galactic Ghoul".
Or the bean counter that wouldn't let enough beans out to do the job(s).
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