HiRISE and Mars Polar Lander Options

[Guest_Sunspot_*]

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/

[MarsEngineer]

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-co...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.

[climber]

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.
-Rob Manning

Hi Rob,
Looking forward to Phoenix landing, I'm wondering if the behaviour of the atmosphere at high latitude is harder to modelize or less "well known" (lack of experience) so this could give us some hope to still find MPL away from the center of the elipse?