HiRISE and Mars Polar Lander |
HiRISE and Mars Polar Lander |
Guest_Sunspot_* |
Dec 6 2006, 02:05 PM
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#1
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Guests |
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/ |
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Guest_Sunspot_* |
May 18 2008, 09:18 AM
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#2
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Guests |
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. |
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May 18 2008, 10:48 AM
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#3
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3648 Joined: 1-October 05 From: Croatia Member No.: 523 |
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. -------------------- |
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