[X] My Assistant

[brachiopod]

It was suggested that the "UFO" streak seen by Spirit might be an old orbiter or a meteor.

I wonder, could the "UFO" be a small undiscovered Martain moon? It might just be a few tens of feet across, orbiting very low, and would not have been visible from Earth due to the glare from the planet. Mars does have two very small moons now, why not more smaller moons? However arguing against this is that I think that they said that it was in polar orbit; pretty unusual for a moon and maybe even impossible to maintain over long periods of time.

Bryan

[djellison]

iirc - V2 Orbiter was whacked up into a high orbit (to avoid any planetary contamination complaints) before it died.

"The orbiter developed a leak in its propulsion system that vented its attitude control gas. It was placed in a 302 x 33176 km orbit and turned off on 25 July 1978 after returning almost 16,000 images in 706 orbits around Mars."


Unless they used radar tracking to find exactly where it is - gravitational pertubations, atmospheric drag and other issue will mean it'll be quite hard to specifically say where V2O was at the time of that picture - but probably easy to calculate if its orbit would have allowed it to be in that particular place.

Doug