Probe's Powerful Camera Spots Vikings On Mars

New Scientist ^ | 12-5-2006 | David Chandler

[blam]

Probe's powerful camera spots Vikings on Mars

12:29 05 December 2006
NewScientist.com news service
David Chandler

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spots Spirit's backshell and parachute (Image: NASA)

After three decades lost on the Red Planet, Viking 2's backshell is spotted from space (Image: NASA)

It is a feat millions of times more impressive than finding a needle in a haystack. The new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted about a dozen spacecraft on the Martian surface and, incredibly, taken pictures of such sharpness that scientists have been able to identify individual rocks that were first photographed by the Viking landers in 1976.

The new series of pictures released late on Monday show both of the Viking landers, never spotted from orbit before, as well as their nearby heat shields and backshells. These are the top and bottom covers of the capsules in which the rovers decended through the Martian atmosphere to land.

The MRO has also found the Mars rover Spirit , the pyramid-shaped structure in which it landed, its backshell and parachute. The satellite probe had already found the rover Opportunity and its landing structure, sending back images within its first week of operations in October 2006.

Picturing the Viking landers from orbit is quite a coup for MRO. Tim Parker, a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, told New Scientist that it was possible to clearly identify them by analysing the Martian landscape, even though the images show little detail.

Parker carefully matched rocks and other topographic features seen in the orbital views with those seen images the landers took on the ground. "I found a much better location match" than had been made from earlier orbital pictures, he says. It turns out Viking 1 is about 6 kilometres (3.8 miles) away..

[RightWhale]

Excellent! And well said.

[RightOnline]

VERY cool. :)