36 years ago, on this very same day, 2 December 1971, the Soviet probe Mars 3 successfully landed on Mars. Though it functioned for only 20 seconds and no science was returned it was indeed an engineering success.

The first and only picture from Mars 3 lander. Image Credit : Ted Stryk / strykfoto.org

I might be wrong, but wasn't it pretty much decided that there was little data returned and that the "picture" is only noise?

Yes. There have been speculations based on this image,however, that the lander was turned upside down and that line shows the horizon.
I hope that future probes or possibly astronauts will find out that's the reason for the failure

There are some more errr... raw images:




Image of the PropM rover:

A date & an achievement worth noting to be sure, ZV...and only 14 years after Sputnik I!

Yes, only 14 years after Sputnik mankind achieved a soft landing on Mars!

But... it's December already, it's an important month for Martian Exploration.
For example, tomorrow is 3th December. It's the day when Mars Polar Lander had to land, but the contact was lost. Eight years after that, we still don't know what happened to it.
Then... we have 25th December. It was the day when Beagle 2 was supposed to land... It was also lost...
So, we have several probes (Mars 3, MPL, Beagle 2) which were sheduled to land in December, and all failed. Bad statistics...

Perhaps a little bit OT, but not completely...
Today, when looking to last MER images, I was talking to myself once more: "Is incredible, these beautiful pictures are almost realtime shots from the surface of another planet, and they comes daily in the last 4 years!". Same feeling with Cassini gallery...
I really hope this will continue to be the normality in the future, with a continuous coverage through MSL, EXO-mars and other long-duration missions. Besides scientific return, I think is important to easily access such "alien" visions, it helps us (poor humans) to have a wider breath, avoiding humanity to collapse on herself...
Maybe I'm a dreamer, any though on that?

You're absolutely right, Dilo...we need to keep looking outward, always. We always have before. That's why we didn't become extinct in some forgotten African valley three or four million years ago...there were always a few rabble-rousers that wanted to see what was beyond the next hill.

If we play it right, it's our immortality... ...God, how I hope that we do.

Good, that makes three dreamers at UMSF.
How many more?

The denizens of Earth need Mars...more than they know.

EXO-mars' data released daily by ESA ? Are you kidding?

Hehe, Peter, I understand your sarcasm but I deliberately included EXO-mars in the hope to see a change in the PR ESA policy in the future... at the end, perhaps, it depends also from public opinion pressure!

I'd count myself as one more. Although I don't think we should stop at mars

Wait one minute, a topic on spacecraft lost around the red planet or on its surface without mentioning the " Great Ghalactic Ghoul ", an imaginary monster living somewhere out around the orbit of the red planet that just likes to destroy spacecraft
This 'absurd' explanation for lost spacecraft was created by Donald Neff, a journalist of TIME magazine

MY SPECULATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE SOVIET MARS 3 LANDER IMAGE


I cropped the ‘probable data’ portion from the original image.
Click to view attachment



I wrote three C/C++ programs to reduce only image noise:
• Eliminate salt and pepper noise with a modified rank order filter
• Reduce Gaussian noise with a modified sigma filter
• Reduce other noise (speckle and non-Gaussian) via normalization

Click to view attachment

The modifications I made to several well known filter algorithms (Lee’s sigma filter, the Frost MSE filter, and the rank order filters, -etc.) were done in such a way as to only adjust noisy pixels and to leave the rest of the image untouched. The programs characterized each pixel as either: ‘image’ or ‘highly probable noise’; the programs then assigned the noisy pixels new values depending on their noise type: rank order median for salt and pepper, sigma values or Gaussian, -etc. In the end, over 64% of the final pixels have retained their exact original values. I then wrote another C program to zoom out the image (3x) using the bi-cubic spline interpolation algorithm from the Harley & Weeks image processing handbook.

My Top 4 Interpretations of the Resulting Image


Click to view attachment

(1) Most Probable - (bright horizontal line at the bottom) - Looking down at the ground at something less then 45 degrees, but not under the ship. The dark area is disturbed soil; may be caused by a skidding/rolling type landing. We are looking out less then 2 meters (?). The bright line is a power up artifact of the camera and/or a reflection off one of the unfolded shiny metal shrouds on the lander. This composition is reminiscent of Surveyor, Viking, Venera, and other landers looking at or near their feet as one of their first images.

( no image - just flip the one above)

2) Possible - (flip the image to any of the two vertical orientations) Looking down again at the ground, possibly an out of focus scrape mark from the ship skidding/rolling or just the soil beneath the camera. We are looking down at less than 1 meter (?)

Click to view attachment

(3) Most Wishful - (bright horizontal line at top) Looking out at the horizon with a dark ridge in the foreground – notice the ‘rocks’ in and on the dark foreground ridge... Notice the large rock near the top right near the bright horizon. Notice the rock near the bottom right at the trailing edge of the dark ridge. Notice the rock(s) on the dark ridge near the left edge of the image. Notice the dusty atmosphere near the horizon (at top). We are looking outward from meters to the local horizon (a hundred meters?)

(4) Consensus since the 1970’s - This whole ‘image’ is just noise and my programs and your programs and you and I are just hallucinating, i.e. a Soviet Rorschach test.

Some other points to consider:
- Soviet experts (early 1970s) agreed that this image was just noise.
- The camera’s longer axis should be the vertical axis of the image – making interpretation 1, 2, and 3, scenes from a craft lying on its side.
- The landing was during a regional/global dust storm
- The available lighting was supposedly 50lux (low lighting)

I interpret the uniformly bright area in the image as the point where the vidicon camera was turned on. It then AGC’ed within a few lines to a normal gain-level. I suggest this because the noise pixels in the original (un-cropped) image just above this bright area (for ~10 lines before the bright area and parallel to the bright line across the image) are uniformly brighter by a few percent - compared to the noise pixels in all the lines before it; This statistically significant observation suggests the this may be the actual turn-on time of the vidicon; then we see the vidicon ‘blooming’ (i.e. all signal, no contrast, the white area); and then the gain control takes over….and we have a noisy image for ~60 more lines before the transmission stops. Alternatively, since this ‘brighter’ noise is spatially correlated to the bright line, it just may be a photographic artifact of the stupid screen-shot that we have been forced to deal with for the last 30+ years. I would really love to get a hold of the original Soviet data!

Final Conjecture:
Mars 3 landed but may have skidded or tipped over during the final approach. The usual suspects are rocks, rockets, chutes, winds, -etc. The damaged lander started its science sequence. The first image was in the process of beaming down to Earth. The orientation of the camera to the noisy image fragment suggests that the lander is not in the upright position. After 70 scan lines reach Earth, the signal is suddenly lost. What failed? Was it the transmitter, the electrical system, the final remnants of the propellant leaking from broken rocket nozzles onto panels and into the system electronics or maybe the battered lander just slouched and started rolling over again as a result of a precarious perch or the slumping soil and rock mechanics from the hard landing…

To the MRO Crew:
Please take some lucky MRO images of the Mars 3 landing site for Christmas!
Its easy…look in and near northern Ptolemy Crater , 45° S, 158° W; you should see a dusty old parachute and a nearby shiny Soviet lander lying on its side!
Thanks!!


Parting Shot -- A False Color Image of the Wishful Horizon Interp:

Click to view attachment

"Its easy…look in and near northern Ptolemy Crater , 45° S, 158° W; "


45° S, 158° W (+ or - 200 km or thereabouts).

Phil

So a 400km x 400km search box. 160,000 sqkm

That's only 2500+ HiRISE images - what's the problem.



Doug

A brief scan of the web turned up these images of the MARS 3 lander in a Moscow Museum

the cameras are on the top (there were two, I believe...
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Here is the ship with lander in the aeroshell
Click to view attachment


enjoy comrades!

Yes, there were two of them, and the black box visible on top is the amazing PrOP-M walking minirover

Thanks for sharing those photos and only the black & white photo shows the arm which deployed the PrOP-M, which was a small tethered rover at the end of an arm on these Soviet-Russian Mars pod landers which were based on the Luna 9 four-petalled opening/righting mechanism!

We have had 8 more inches of snow today on top of the 10 inches from a few days ago...
...so I was shovelling the driveway and heaving snow and then watching it roll down if i didn't get it over the top of the heap...

I am putting a stake in the ground: based on the proximity of all landers to craters and then Oppy actually rolling into one, I speculate that the Mars 3 is tipped over in the bottom a crater. probably not a very deep one, but I conjecture it caught the slope and rolled over to the bottom. The picture I call 'the most probable' would then show the view at the bottom of a crater with undisturbed and disturbed soil (e.g. Oppy's airbag prints, MER tracks in general, -etc). Now if the HiRise guys just listened to my instructions on how to snap a picture of Mars 3, we will all have a wonderful Christmas present

Dear PDP8 : agreed !
Here are the original "data" in better format + its stretched on its good vertical axis.
The resulting "noise", processed this way, could easily be interpreted as a dark surface seen under a dusty sky with the Sun being hidden by the camera cover just outside the left of the "picture"... If this is indeed an "image"... If the Mars 3 s/c worked well until reaching the surface... If this successful 20 sec data is not Soviet propaganda... Too many "ifs" !!!

Happy MARS 3 Landing Anniversary (well, yesterday: Dec 2, 1971 -- Dec 2, 2009)

It has now been 38 years and only one HiRise image of the neighborhood!

We shall find you yet!

Cheers

(this thread is 2 years old...yikes!)

Resurrecting an old thread... but it seems better than starting a new one, especially because the images are just above this post... I just had one of those epiphany things.

I was looking at this:

http://www.mrc.uidaho.edu/entryws/full/pro...e_detailed.html

(Presentation 1.41 about Venera probes, but it also covers Mars 3 and Mars 6). A picture and diagram of Mars 3 shows the dual camera system - it had two cameras like Luna 13, not one camera like Luna 9. But the Luna 13 panoramic image starts with a messy area which is really a closeup of the second camera (which failed to operate). Is this what is being viewed in the fragment of a panorama from Mars 3? In this view it would be real image data, but useless - if the Luna 13 image is anything to go by it's not a reflection of the surface of Mars in the camera body. But it might explain what is being seen.

Phil

My congratulations on forthcoming anniversary landings to Mars of Mars 3 lander! 40 years of silence and riddles.

This photo is made in the beginning of this year in Memorial Astronautics Museum in Moscow

Other photos on a site http://mars71.ru/fotos.php

a picture of a Mars-71 lander during impact tests

Mars 3 hardware may have been spotted in some HiRISE images. The parachute and heatshield look convincing to me.

http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_031036_1345

Very nice

"Philip J. Stooke from the University of West Ontario, Canada, suggested the direction of search and offered helpful advice. Arnold Selivanov (one of the creators of Mars 3) and Vladimir Molodtsov (an engineer at NPO Lavochkin, Moscow) helped with access to data archives. "

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA16920

I've read the text and found that they did their homework well, with models of what each component would look like etc. Good job.

But the fact that the images do leave room for other interpretations leaves me still hesitant.

Yet if the further studies they mention do show that this is the real thing I do say congratulations to Vitali Egorov, Alexander Basilevsky and others for the detective work of locating Mars 3!

I did offer some advice on this, though I had nothing to do with finding the objects in the image. But I don't actually see that reference to me in any of the links.

Phil

It's the 2nd paragraph from bottom on this page; weird how many repeat 'home pages' there are for missions.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro2013411.html

One similar feature would be easy to explain away; several anomalous ones together, much less so, IMO.

If they found this, I can only smile and clap. Amazing work, amazing crowdsourcing.

Your thought of a movement trajectory very much helped.


Important argument - chain length on retrorocket. HiRise showed 4,8 m, and check according to drawings in NPO Lavochkin - 4,5 m + retrorocket engine.

Oh yes I did note that, and it's one reason I found this finding interesting enough to reply to.
And we do know Mars 3 are in this area, or perhaps somewhat to the north.
Yet at 25cm per pixel is the highest resolution we might get. (For the near future at least.) And that leaves the lander and those retrorocket parts at a size just at just a few pixels wide. Subsequent images where the light comes from different directions might perhaps give us an better idea of the hight of each of these item. which might give more credence to this.

The most full account (in Russian) by Zelenyikot himself is here: http://habrahabr.ru/post/175827/
With reference to you, of course.

Phil,
As our "International" UMSF cartographer, could you, please, be so kind to tell us what are the coordinates of the Mars 3 Lander itself on those images (South with E and/or W longitudes) ?
Thanks again so much in advance and warmest regards, VM

Darn it, my atlas is now out of date.

According to my preliminary calculations on the newest image (map-projected), the lander is 3201 pixels north of the image centre and 1886 pixels west of the centre. That makes it 800 m north or 0.013 degrees north, and 471 m west or 0.008 degrees west.

That would give the location of 45.045 degrees south, 202.023 degrees east (157.977 degrees west)

Phil

Good thing you're working on a second book

Zelenyikot wrote a long blog entry about the process; I've translated it (with Google translate and Zelenyikot's help) and annotated it and posted it here.

Thanks so much Phil !

Orientation of the items on the surface was as expected is pretty significant, IMO.

If confirmed at some point, it is heartening to know so much went correctly during the mission. Late 60s/early 70s technology and they got a probe on the surface, count me thunderstruck. Impressive accomplishment!

IIRC, there was some speculation (if this is the right mission) the parachute might have come done on the probe, which would have been a frustrating outcome. To there credit, that may not have happened.

LOL, just pondering the imaging wizards here and elsewhere might already be trying to match up surface rocks supposedly visible on the partial video frame sent down with the images possibly showing the hardware with the surface features in the area.

That would've been an interesting way to explain the brief transmission, and then silence. However it's hard to imagine the chute was radio opaque.

I'm pretty sure there was no identifiable data in that image, since what looks like the 'horizon' is actually vertical. And since Mars 3 appears to be right side up, it can't be even that.
Only way to figure it out for sure would be to send something to get the 'ground truth'.

To me, that's one of the most amazing things in the whole story, that apparently it came down almost exactly in the position they had calculated long ago (45S 158W). There were so many unknown factors (it was '71, the original landingsite might have been selected based on Mariner 4 images), that landing ellipse was hundreds of kilometers big, and then seemingly it ends up almost exactly on the calculated spot..

I wonder if the entire "chain" in the HiRISE image is all chain, or possibly the darkness at the beginning of the chain is a rock or some other soil discoloration causing the chain to appear longer.

Solving the Mars 6 landing mistery would be great also...

It not the rock, is the engine of soft landing.



We will be engaged in it

Luna 9 had one camera, but Luna 13 had two - but only one worked. The Luna 13 panorama starts with a view of the second camera, a fuzzy blob of light and dark patches.

http://mentallandscape.com/C_Luna13_2.jpg

( thanks to Don Mitchell for collecting this and many other images here:

http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogMoon.htm

Mars 3 had the same dual camera design as Luna 13. If there is any real information in the Mars 3 image it is almost certainly part of the second camera, not the surface of Mars.

Phil

So this was an amazing precursor to the MSL "Skycrane" technique. Impressive, since it almost worked.

--Bill

It did work, unless the landing shock somehow disabled the lander 14.5s late.

Phil, I know, you are drooling over the Mars 3 images...
So, I decided to make a pixel overlap just for you (and also for our UMSF members) between the 2 HiRISE images PSP_006154_1345 and ESP_031036_1345 to show the Mars 3 lander with some more details...
The petals are readily visible now. This work is dedicated to you and your outstanding "Atlas of Mars" book. Enjoy !
Click to view attachment

This really look suggestive, thank you for your post and image.

Thanks! Yes, it looks very good.

Phil