Looking at the images of the Spirit/Opportunity landing site, it seems many of the features such as tracks and rocket blast markings have faded considerably often to the point of being invisible in the nearly three years since landing.
This had me thinking about the MGS images taken in the hope of finding MPL. Initially it was reported that MGS had spotted the lander, one image had a white spot/streak interpreted as the parachute and a dark patch with a spot in the centre not too far off, taken to be the blast zone of the rockets with the lander in the centre.
However another image taken 5 years later seemed to discount this theory - the features had faded or changed significantly. BUT, seeing how much the rover sites have changed in an even shorter time, wouldn't the same happen to the MPL site in 5 years - perhaps to an even greater degree with the more extreme seasonal changes at that location. Also, the latest HiRISE images show just how difficult it has been to spot the landers on the surface with MGS, the Viking sites in particular.
I hope HiRISE takes another look at this spot.
Mars Polar Lander NOT Found, MSSS article:
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/10/17/
Digging up this thread. The Sun has returned to the south pole so maybe it's time to search for the Mars Polar Lander.
I wonder how climate changes described in an article yesterday have affected the hardware of MPL.
I think it's a good idea to collect links to HiRISE images that cross the MPL landing ellipse. For starters, here are the MOC pages that describe the search and show the search region:
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/12_99_MPLsearch/index.html
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/1_24_00_polarlander/index.html
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/oct_2000_sampler/polar_site/index.html
These images unfortunately do not include any latitude/longitude information. However, here's a page from the MOLA team that does, suggesting that a useful box to consider is 75 to 77 south and 164 to 166 east.
http://ssed.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mpl.html
--Emily
I am wondering if the MPL (Mars Polar Lander) did not crash but sank into the the ice. I read as one of the possible causes was that the landing sensor thought it landed.
Just my small thought.
Help them find Mars Polar Lander!
article written by Mr. Phil Plait : http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/05/10/help-find-mars-polar-lander/
and the publication on HiRISE website: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/HiBlog/?p=134
Regards,
Svetlio
I do find it odd that absolutely no trace of Mars Polar Lander has been spotted within HiRISE images so far. If the failure scenario proposed by the investigation team is correct, the parachute deployed successfully, the heatshield was jettisoned and the lander separated from the backshell. All of those components are VERY striking in images of the MER landing sites, in fact you can see them without having to view the images at a "one to one" scale, you certainly didn't need to search for them.
How would several Martian polar winters have affected those components visibility, would they "weather " differently to those at lower latitudes such as Spirit and Opportunity, is that the reason they haven't been spotted I wonder? I suppose it's also possible that something else went wrong during EDL - the parachute failed to deploy for example.
Yesss... but we knew where those sites were! The descent images brought us very close, and the surface images clinched it. Here, we have no clue where to look across those vast images. Well, a clue, the target ellipses. But there's a lot of territory to search.
Phil
It's parachute would.
Also, if you are unable to view the big jp2 images, you may start a quick search using the grayscale .jpg images. Rover tracks are visible, so you may be even able to spot the rocket blast zone of MPL.
It's only easy if you know what you're looking for, and where to look. We know nothing about the state of the vehicle - I'm not sure we even know if the DS2 probes were deployed, though I might be wrong about that, not having looked it up. And we don't know where to look.
But put that aside... can anybody identify in HiRISE the feature initially interpreted as MPL in MOC images? I've only glanced, but not found it yet.
Phil
That's true! But we don't know that's what happened, and one explanation for the difficulty in finding it would be...
Phil
Sigh, I think looking for this thing is an exercise in futility AND a recipe to get mad. The amount of topography and albedo differences in some images is crazy, looking for a tiny object down there is madness. I just gave one single image almost a full going-over and I swear I'm starting to see things. Tell me I'm nuts, these things in the image below can't be the parachute and the lander. I know the "lander" is just too big to be real, but you've gotta admit it looks out of place there and almost even shows blast marks underneath! In reality I'd expect MPL to appear the same pixel size as in the half-res context above, not twice that.
http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/9/14/1431389/HiRISE_weird.png
I like C!
I dunno, man, just don't know. They look more compelling to me than other purported finds...in fact, the "lander" almost looks like it made a successful descent. That topography is just a mess, though, and definitely promotes the Rorschach Effect.
We might need to send a cam with 1 cm resolution to find the damn thing in this stuff. Guess there's still a possibility we might get super-lucky and catch a specular reflection if there's some reasonably bare metal exposed & the geometry happens to be right.
Neglecting the feasibility of actually acquiring that dataset, can you imagine what an effort it would be to inspect the entire landing ellipse at 1cm resolution? We're talking about a 600 times larger pixel area than even this (already huge) amount. That would undoubtedly require a computer pattern recognition algorithm, no human would venture into sifting through that systematically. All the more because we don't even know what we're looking for - deployed chutes, broken heat shields or just a single crater. It's not that easy to tell a computer "find everything out of the ordinary!" either.
I wonder what effects to metal surfaces (or parachute) a 9 year exposure to this environment would produce. Are we even sure this sublimation and frosting process didn't already bury all hardware or at least coat it with a thin layer of dust and rendered it part of that environment? Additionally, how does albedo in this region compare to equatorial sites, are we expecting metal surfaces and the parachute to jump out or is the terrain here much brighter (apart from certain very dark areas)?
So many unknowns...
I am choosing to ignore this thread until Phoenix is safely on the ground
I found a candidate site for the lander. Currently, I'm downloading the source JP2 file so that I can get a much better look; but the feature is totally out of place. It could still be part of a cave entrance of some sort, so I need a much better look. It appears to be about the correct size and has maybe created a very small crater.
I'm excited...it is by far the most promising feature I've seen after review about half of all the HRISE images in this area. Not all of the terrain is as bad as some suggest.
I finally have a real close-up view of my feature. It is strange. I'm not so sure it is the lander, unless the parachute landed on top of it and is completely draped over it.
Here is a view.
Remember, the MPL lander dropped away from the backshell and chute before landing. It would have to be a quite exceptional coincidence for either, the parachute to land right on top of the lander, or, the landing process to work fine until the lander was due to separate and then fail. Also, the parachute should be much much brighter than that. Even pathfinders 10+ year old parachute is whiter than white to HiRISE
Doug
Oh - I agree with that point, we don't know if the parachute deployed. However, if it did, it's going to be very big, very bright and very obvious indeed. You would find it easily with HiRISE. There wont be an 'is that the parachute' sort of moment - it'll be 'that IS the parachute'. I was saying, in response to 'unless the parachute landed on top of it' that there's no way the parachute would be a not-obvious object.
If the situation arises when we've got the full ellipse in HiRISE and there's no Parachute and backshell, then the failure mode has to be backed up to between cruise stage sep, and chute deployment. i.e. the entry process.
Doug
Some areas of the landing site look VERY dangerous, I suppose it's possible MPL failed at touchdown after a successful Entry and Descent.
Anybody else suddenly having problems with the HiRISE website?
--Emily
Here context for the feature I showed.
Yay, the website seems to be back up.
--Emily
Sorry, but the illumination is not from lower right. It is from the upper left. That I am absolutely sure of.
MarsIsImportant, I was also completely confused about what the north azimuth meant for HiRISE images until I had a conversation with some of the HiRISE folks. As Tim says, the north azimuth for the non-map-projected images (which are the ones I would recommend for performing these searches, as they represent non-resampled data) are measured clockwise from the right side of the frame (which I find counterintuitive enough; it gets worse). For map-projected images, it's the same, as long as you're dealing with an image that is not close to one of the poles. Polar images are in a polar stereographic projection, in which lines of latitude make concentric circles around the pole, and lines of longitude are straight, intersecting at the pole. So in the map-projected images of places close to the pole, north is not necessarily up. Which direction north is depends upon what longitude you're looking at. If you're looking at a place near longitude 0, north will be up. However, the Mars Polar Lander landing site is at 165, which is to say very close to longitude 180, so the map-projected images have north almost straight down. For the one you are looking at, PSP_005114_1035, the direction to north is given as 75 degrees, which (when you measure it clockwise from the right side of the frame) gives you a north direction that is only 15 degrees to the right of straight down.
I think http://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Parker/ would be the first to admit that he is not always right. But I think that if Tim says he's sure about something, you should consider it to be pretty likely that he's right.
--Emily
Hi friends (and Hi Tim ... we have to stop meeting like this),
My thoughts are:
1) We really do not know what caused MPL to disappear. While the MPL failure review board identified the "most probable cause" as a premature shutdown of the descent engines at about 40 m above the ground due to a software bug, that bug was only one of several possible failure modes that were identified then and since. We can not make too many assumptions as to what the lander looks like. (But I do think it is there somewhere.)
2) Unless Mars itself camouflages the vehicle (e.g. by overlaying layers of dust in the annual CO2 ice deposit, or the lander has fallen into one of the larger "spiders"), I think we should see something. The lander's design (including heat shield and backshell) used a lot of highly reflective MLI (multi-layer insulation) blanketing in many key places. I suspect that regardless of how it landed, there should be pieces of highly reflective material that are exposed and would result in one or more "hot pixels". Check out the image of the airbag cover from 1997 Mars Pathfinder's landing on slide 6 or 7 as well as the Mars Pathfinder heat shield debris here http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/HiBlog/wp-content/uploads/Parker_HiRISE_talk.pdf.
Note how bright that 1 meter round piece of airbag cover MLI is. We saw it in the distance in 1997 but it was only after we got the view from HiRISE that we realized that it was airbag cover debris.
3) We have not yet covered the landing ellipse with HiRISE images. I think we have covered more than 50% but there is still room to believe that MPL landed outside the areas imaged so far. The HiRISE/MRO team stopped imaging the MPL area once the southern summer sun set. As Tim suggests, the lander could be a km from one of the edges of any of these images.
I am betting on next year! While our eyes are sore (especially Tim's) and our image processing software did not yield anything, we could be wrong ... these images cover a lot of territory. Please let the HiRISE gang know if you find something! Our inquiring minds want to know!
Take care!
-Rob Manning
***************
These comments are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of JPL, Caltech nor NASA.
Emily,
The azimuth on the label Tim pointed out for the non-map image that I posted is 95 degrees. It points north relative to the map. That is basically a right angle that points North. That clearly points to the right of the image. West is toward the top of the image. East is on the bottom of the image. The South Pole is toward the left of the image as you face it.
I am correct. I have no doubt.
I've been taking a look around that same JP2 image. Many spiders appear to be depressions and cracks. Others are dunes.
Also the lighting appears to change in different parts of the image. Perhaps this is because it is so close to the South Pole. Perhaps the azimuth is only good for the center of the image. Or the label is wrong, which would have led me astray in my conclusions. Some parts of the image appear to be lighted from the bottom right. Or it maybe just too late at night and my eyes are playing tricks.
Something is not right with this image projection. So with that in mind, I will consider it possible I don't have everything completely accurate.
I need to get some sleep. Tomorrow I will look some more. So if I am wrong, then I apologize to Tim now instead of later. The truth is what we are after. It's not a popularity contest.
I've tidied this thread up a little - MIP, please be more careful before jumping to a conclusion so contrary to the collective wisdom, and then stating quite so forcefully.
The killer point is that if stereo imagery describes the feature as a depression, then the label is irrelevant - illumination is from the lower right. As another post ( which made no sense during clear up, so was culled ) - you must be carefull assuming that MRO is heading south, and the East is to the right. This could be an ascending observation where the geometry would be inverted.
Doug
MIP: "Something is not right with this image projection"
Most HiRISE images are given in a cylindrical projection, north straight up. but near-polar images like these are in polar stereographic, and north is in a different place. All the information you need is in the table with each image.
Phil
Furthermore, if the dataset in question is non-map projected (NOMAP), there is no projection involved. As others have said, depending on whether the observation took place on the ascending or descending node, the illumination for these products would generally seem to come from diametrically opposite directions. If you feel the illumination suddenly "changes direction" across a single swath, that's just your brain being tricked by reverse topography (e.g. hills turning into depressions).
Tim53 said in a earlier post there's another one of those conical pits in the area suggesting this has nothing to do with MPL. If this is an impact crater, its morphology seems inconsistent with what I'd expect of a hypersonic impact into hard or rough soil. The pit itself is too large, this one is supposedly 50 meters across. I wouldn't expect a small object travelling at say 400 m/s to produce a crater that big.
If I had to put my money on it (Murphy's law!), I'd say the lander is either in the heavily clouded-over images we have now or in the rest of the ellipse that hasn't been covered yet. Other than that, anything suspicious would have probably already jumped out at the HiRISE team, at least when looking at your typical, fairly flat and dull terrain here (though I am wondering how systematic their search was so we can modify our "expectations"). On the other hand, images like PSP_005536_1030 (especially the top part of NOMAP version) have pretty big albedo variations and small-scale topography so in principle, something just might be hiding over there.
Argh. As Gordan said earlier, "so many unknowns"! Seems as if this manifest fact will be compounded by the fact that there well might be active geology at the site; those pits sure look like something related to the CO2 geysers to me, or some other outgassing/collapse mechanism.
I might be wrong about this, but if you're thinking about heat shield heat, there might not be that much heat at all. If the heat shield is ablative, the part that heats up is the part that's ablated away, which is a mechanism for keeping the shield cool. The shield material is a very good heat insulator so it doesn't store too much heat during reentry. If you're talking about impact-induced heating, my gut feeling tells me there isn't that much produced. A Mach 2 impact is likely to compress/scatter soil rather than heat it up significantly. Also, keep in mind that water ice (if it's water) has a high specific melting heat so it would take a LOT of heat to melt that large a volume.
Yes, I concur. Ablative material (sort of "cork" as they say in Phoenix video) won't let heatshield very hot.
So, we're back on the search
What kind of effect would the downed lander have on the surrounding area over time? There are a ton of possibilities here I imagine, anything from growing a pit in the ice to growing a hill of dust.
A friend of mine went to Greenland a while back and he showed this fascinating, yet depressing, picture of a big hole in the snow made by a single Mars bar wrapper. MPL is not that dark though I would think.
Hi Climber,
You are correct. There was and continues to be a lot of uncertainty in our knowledge of the density variations in the altitude range that the entry vehicle does most of its deceleration (mostly between 20 and 50 km). Given that these machines enter at very shallow entry flight path angles - around 13.5 degrees for MPL - only a few percent uncertainty in our estimates of the atmosphere density means the difference of many 10s of km on the surface. The ellipse shown on the HiRISE site (made by Tim) is based on our best guess of where the vehicle was when it reached the top of the atmosphere (based on our radiometric tracking data taken in the hours and days before landing). We think these estimates were pretty good and do not depend much on what failures may have happened to the vehicle. We then use computer simulations to model entry, descent and landing using one atmosphere model (as well as slight variations in the entry initial conditions), we then do the simulation again and again using slightly different models (correctly selected statistics-wise) and then we look to see how these are scattered on the surface. The ellipse that Tim placed on that HiRISE map at the HiRISE site represents about a 2-sigma ellipse (see Emily's Blog from yesterday). So we believe that there is about an 86% probability that MPL is inside that ellipse.
Of course, people ask me; What if the cruise stage never came off? or What if the parachute did not open? What if it tumbled during entry? Well it turns out that these cases do not make a huge difference in the position and shape of the 2-sigma ellipse. It makes it a tad longer (probably moves it further south a few km as well ). As you suggest Climber, one place that we could be very wrong and would make a bigger difference in the ellipse is the atmosphere. You will also notice that the HiRISE images do not cover the right side of the ellipse. That was due to a mistake I made (an unfortunate change of longitude definitions occurred just after the post-MPL trajectory reconstruction that I was not aware of ... it resulted in our estimates of where the ellipse was painted on the surface moving a few km to the east after the HiRISE image "campaign" was well under way).
As I said before, it is there somewhere and I have some faith that it will eventually be seen. While I could be wrong (I have been many times in this biz), I doubt that it would have made a crater that did not leave equipment visibly scattered on the surface (unless subsequently covered by dust or other Mars material). Even without a parachute, it would have slowed down to very nearly it's Mars "terminal velocity" which for this vehicle is around 220 - 300 m/s (depending on tumbling attitude). That is fast but not fast enough to poke a deep hole in Mars!
If it is a needle in a haystack, I *think* it will be a bright needle. (My friends think I am an optimist.)
Cheers!
-Rob M
***************
These comments and opinions are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of JPL, Caltech nor NASA.
Remcook,
Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking as well. I'll bet that reflective or not, the net effect would be to make a depression in ice. If it's not reflecting the light it absorbs heat would tend to make a hole, and since the sides of the hole would be more vertical than the surface, the sides would tend to enlarge over time. And if does reflect the light, said light would mostly impact nearby, making the surface around the lander slightly hotter due to the reflections.
I'm betting MPL will be in a small depression, larger than the size of the lander, whether it landed correctly or not.
To do this properly, I created a spreadsheet on the Yahoo groups site with picture names across the top, and ppl checking them going down vertically. Post here which photos you have searched and to how far (Y pixel number), and I'll try to update the file. This way efforts can be divided appropriately.
Link http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/unmannedspaceflight/files/.
BTW, as a suggestion for future futile searches, adding some false positives to the mix is a good idea. Maybe 25-100 every picture might cut out the boredom, and give ppl something to score each other on.
Wow. I give up. I see nothing in that image even remotely out of place.
(Savagely beautiful, yes; out of the "ordinary", no.)
Do you have an annotated image you could post?
-Mike
I'm glad I'm not in charge of these kinds of searches, because I also wouldn't have spotted anything 'unusual' in that figure...
(Has anyone else noticed that the deposit structure resembles a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron?)
(I was kinda using that nomenclature to work my way down one axon then on to another during my search.)
-Mike
Well, it took me way too long to do this, but I have finally posted a page on the search:
http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/mars_reconnaissance_orbiter/hirise_lander_search.html
There's more that I want to do, but I figured this was a good start. I, too, had had the idea of having people report which images they were searching, or ask to be assigned one, but hendric beat me to it. Still, if you want to let me know which images you are searching, do pop me a PM or an email and I'll maintain a tally.
One thing I want to do is create my own base map and see where there are areas of overlap between images. One good test for the viability of a candidate is to see how it looks under different lighting geometry, which you can do if you are lucky enough to have found a candidate near the edge of an image where it may have overlapped another.
--Emily
Just a quick one... probably nothing, of course. Same image as Tim's.
Phil
So perhaps we should call this place 'The Boneyard'...
Yes, I was struck, not by the paucity of candidates but by their profusion. if any little lump might be a spacecraft it really is a boneyard. And proving anything will be really hard. Color might do the trick, though, as you say.
I liked it better in the old days when we were just comparing surface and orbital images!
Phil
That'll be much MUCH easier with the triangulation we'll get via UHF
Doug
How accurate is that, anyway?
http://www.msss.com/mer_mission/finding_mer/ - and I'm sure it's improved since then. I'm sure it'll be enough to say 'it's in THIS HiRISE image' giving us a realistic chance of identifying the site from local features / rock patterns etc.
Doug
That's pretty cool, I didn't know the orbiting spacecraft relays could even measure the Doppler shift. Techniques like this really give the term "nailing it down" meaning.
This caught my eye, back-shell top-left, parachute bottom-right:
Yeah, more like 10m, not 80. That looks like what would happen if someone tried to fake a backshell and chute out of rock
Yeah thought so, the MPL landing ellipse seems to be littered with rock carvings of back-shells, parachutes and landers!
This is going to be hard...
That nature can play tricks on people. When you're looking for a backshell, all the rocks look like backshells.
Doug
Having looked at parts of the landing site with HiRISE images, some of it looks treacherous.... I wonder, had the MPL team had images with that resolution available to them when planning the landing, would they have chosen a different area?
Also, illustrations of what MPL would look like from orbit show it with the solar arrays deployed, if it did fail during the entry phase, deployment is unlikely to have happened ? - making it even harder to see.
I've now gone through all the images, all of them at half resolution except two ones (on of them being PSP_005536_1030), concentrating on rougher and brighter terrains where it would be easier to miss something. I operated under the assumption that given the jumbled look of some of the terrain with large albedo variations, my best bet would just be looking for a backshell and/or parachute. If the EDL sequnce didn't get as far as parachute deployment, finding the crash site is going to be tough to say the least. If there is a parachute and backshell somewhere, it would be readily apparent even at 50 cm/pix and this speeds up the search significantly. There was (to my eye) not a single candidate for the backshell in any of the images. Given the roughness of some of this terrain, I'd say the lander tipping over at touchdown is a pretty plausible failure scenario as well. I'm left to conclude that it either isn't located in these images (or, by some sick chance, it's in one of the data dropout gaps) or there is no backshell.
How high was MGS coverage of the landing ellipse and at what resolution? MGS later resolved the MER chutes, but that was using cPROTO.
Gordan: Check up this: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/1_24_00_polarlander/index.html
The resolution was about 1.5 m per pixel. "Thus, the MOC team is basically trying to distinguish one or two pixels from nearly 150 million. One team member has remarked that this is like "trying to find a specific needle in...a haystack-sized pile of needles."
What about if the chute deployed and failed in pieces like for the MER first envisioned chute?
May be in this configuration, the whole spacecraft slowed down so the crach was not at full speed. A failed parachute (in piece) may have never been visible to MGS and now to HiRise. So, if the spacecraft is still in the back+heat shield, are they both white? Is there any chance that the colour was not bright enought and the landing not hard enough both to be visible by MGS?
Even a shreded chute like those Boise MER tests would still be a fairly big target - and the backshell might, I expect, survive the impact - especially if the lander seperated before landing.
Doug
Thanks, Zvezdichko and Tim for the pointers. Just for fun, here's the original place MPL was believed to have been found in 2005 (see http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/05/05/index.html), seen by HiRISE (quick'n'dirty "map projection"):
http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n15/ugordan/hirise_moc_mpl.jpg
Later that year, the MSSS team got another look at the candidate site using cPROTO: http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/10/17. It illustrates that to reasonably be able to pick up the lost lander (primarily its chute), cPROTO-like coverage would be needed across the ellipse. In other words, all is probably not lost just yet. The lack of chute detection by MGS might constrain the actual location to more chaotic terrain seen by HiRISE where the feature would not readily stand out to MGS.
BTW, is it me or are the MGS images less contrasted compared to HiRISE? Higher solar elevation in MGS images or something else?
Someone wrote to correct Rob Manning's math in my http://planetary.org/blog/article/00001425/ -- I'm posting the comments here so that people whose minds are less dulled by parenthood can take a look and see if the criticism is correct.
Well...dusting off my brain here, I'd say that the critic is right but so is Rob (he says so himself). The error function basically invokes an additional Gaussian distribution overlay on the overall uncertainty, but its magnitude is pretty small in this instance. The correction does not appear to be at all significant except to purists, and in any case is subsumed by the larger uncertainty envelope (landing ellipse).
Attached is a 2X HiRISE image showing the Polar Lander resting on its side (the whiter pixels at the "top" of the shadow) and a shadow indicating an object approximately 1 meter wide and 3 meters tall. If you look closely at the far end of the shadow you can see a weak cross, which I believe to be the antennae of the spacecraft.
PSP_005536_1030_RED.QLOOK.JP2
The spacecraft is at 33802,67855
Mike Dorward
Sorry...not seeing it. Pretty sweeping claim, and you need to produce more convincing supporting evidence.
All looks totally natural to me.
This one is probably completely natural as well, but it does look interesting enough to mention. Below's a flicker gif between an object in 005536 and Spirit's backshell for reference. The sizes match pretty well, but the location seems too convenient as there are occasionally other round objects inside these trenches, especially in "corners" like this one. Non-map projected image rotated 180 deg to get a more reasonable illumination angle from top left.
Cool...but I think we're getting into some deep kimchi here in a lot of ways. We don't know the rate of dust deposition in this area, for one, and geometrically similar objects are abundant.
Hate to say it, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that somebody's gonna find MPL by tripping over it around 2430.
(Usually when I say such things I'm immediately proven wrong, so here's to the power of negative luck... )
How much of the landing ellipse did MGS cover?, I think the parachute ought to be fairly obvious even with MGS. With Phoenix landing so far down range of it's target - almost outside its landing ellipse infact, perhaps the same happened to MPL, and as others have suggested, we still don't have images of the area it lies in.
I wonder, if the failure scenario reached by the review team is correct, could MPL have survived the landing in some functional condition? Would the solar panels have been deployed? If not the lander will appear even smaller than illustrations indicate.
I know there was some excitement a few weeks after landing when reviews of communications attempts with MPL suggested they may have received some very weak signals, enough evidence at the time for them to re start communications attempts.
Another backshell rock sculpture from 005536_1030? Or an actual piece of MPL?
The MPF, MER, MPL and Phoenix backshells are about 2.6 metres diameter. The Viking backshells are about 3.5m diameter
There is a roughly circular bright object at pixel 36359,42905 of image ESP_013289_1035_RED.jp2. Within this object, on the right side, is a smaller white circle that might be the backshell and which measures 8 or 9 pixels (~ 2-2.25 m) in diameter. It is most brightly lit roughly in its center. Bunched up against this putative backshell, mostly on its left side, would then be the lumpy collapsed parachute. Stretching to the upper right for about 10 meters is a faint stringy-looking feature that would then be the parachute cords laid out and then doubled back. Judging from the HiRise image which includes Phoenix’s parachute cords, so the length here is about right.
This information was presented to the HiRise principal investigator who dismissed it, but he made several errors in his short reply. He apparently looked at the whole object, measured it at 4.5 meters and then stated that nothing on MPL was that large. In fact, the inflated parachute could measure as much as 8.4 meters across, so 4.5 m would seem plausible for a collapsed parachute plus backshell. His second argument was that the candidate was not sufficiently different from the terrain. This is a subjective call, but at the 1:1 scale, or a few steps up or down, there is nothing in the terrain resembling it in the field of view. It does catch the eye. Mine, at least.
Finally, as near as I can make out its lat/lon, it is at 76.55 S, 165.45 E. This is very near the center of the 2 sigma ellipse for the reconstructed trajectory.
I don’t know that it is a part of the MPL hardware, but that after scouring through several HiRise images of the area, this was the only plausible candidate I saw.
P. Fieseler
Thanks for taking the time to respond. It is admittedly an ambiguous object, but I wonder if people are seeing the shapes the way that I am. I will attempt to repost the image with a cartoon of what I see (or imagine that I see). The details, especially the parachute cords, are clearer in the viewer than these posted jpegs.
A parachute flat on the ground would not cast a shadow. An intact back-shell should, however. Perhaps the soil there is soft or mobile.
Vesta, I think your "parachute cords" are actually a small bluff, and are the lower right edge of a small hill on which your interestingly VERY round small thing on top of a bigger round thing lies.
Definitely worth another look, preferably with a different illumination angle.
Always beware the mind's incredible ability to see patterns where none exists.
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=4927&view=findpost&p=108306
Especially on Mars!
--Greg :-)
A thought just occurred to me: If the thrusters did cut off prematurely as in one of the leading theories, would MPL still have been aerodynamically stable during the fall?
I don't know if the atmosphere would have had any significant effect during that short distance (even if it was windy), nor do I know where the vehicle's center of gravity was located. Did MPL have static stability, or were the thrusters totally necessary to keep it normal to Mars' gravity at this stage of the descent?
This could definitely have some bearing on how the wreckage might appear from MRO.
The most likely failure as the investigation concluded, would be an early shut down of thrusters. This means, on the surface, there should be a heatshield, like Phoenix, a Backshell and Parachute, like Phoenix, and a crashed lander.
I'm still looking at the PHX landing sites HiRISE images of the new season, trying to find the landing site - and can't.
Whilst casually poking around to see if I could turn up a copy of that report, I came across http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/3310281.html reporting Michael Malin "possibly" identifying the MPL wreckage. Has this site been reimaged by HiRISE? I haven't found subsequent news on this site, probably my google-fu is weak...
Yes it has been seen by HiRISE, but even before that it was re-imaged by MGS. Malin withdrew his interpretation of that feature, and now we don't know where it is. The HiRISE image is on here somewhere if you look back.
Phil
If you want to expand your search beyond the MPL landing ellipse, you might try looking at CTX images as well, as the Phoenix hardware is all visible in CTX.
Has the entire landing ellipse been covered by HiRISE now? If the hardware were as obvious on the surface as those of phoenix/MER etc, I would have thought something would have been seen by now. Im wondering if we will ever find it now. Or perhaps something else went wrong in the early decent and it was destroyed in the atmosphere.
The last comment I saw from Tim Parker was that a small spot in a CTX image outside the HiRISE coverage would be looked at in HiRISE as the season became favorable again.
Phil
Tanya, let me be the first to welcome you to unmannedspaceflight.com! I'm sure I can speak for all the members when I say I'm looking forward to your perspective on stuff in space! CTX doesn't get nearly enough love -- just by posting here you'll help to get it a little more attention.
[But ewww, a Wesleyan grad. Go Ephs.]
That's cool, it certainly stands out! -- and an advantage of lower resolution is that the image doesn't look as cruddy as the HiRISE images from the same time period
To get to the full CTX frame knowing any image number, append "http://viewer.mars.asu.edu/planetview/inst/ctx/" to the front, so this one is
http://viewer.mars.asu.edu/planetview/inst/ctx/P22_009725_2484_XI_68N125W
I was just reading this article on the difficulties of finding/identifying non-human artifacts around the solar system (http://news.discovery.com/space/our-solar-system-might-be-littered-with-alien-artifacts-111109.html), which included this picture of the 14 ft wide Lunar Surveyor 6 lander, as seen by the LRO:
http://blogs.discovery.com/.a/6a00d8341bf67c53ef0162fc415b68970d-800wi
The low sun angle really makes this lander stand-out clearly as a spike of shadow. Certainly it could be confused with a boulder, but at least in this case there're not a lot of boulders around to confuse the issue. This leads me to wonder whether the search for the Mars Polar Lander might be revisited using low sun angle images from MRO. Or was this an aspect of the existing search?
Given the latitude of the MPL landing site - the sun is always at a low angle.
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