NASA's Mars Polar Lander Found at Last?

Ant wrote in to mention that the Sky and Telescope is running a story (with photographs and other images) that NASA's Mars Polar Lander (MPL) may have been found. From the article: "On December 9, 1999, it was supposed to touch down near the red planet's south pole but disappeared after entering the Martian atmosphere without a trace. 5.5 years later, scientists think they may have finally located the lander's wreckage and confirmed what went wrong with the mission...The search for Mars Polar Lander was hampered by inexperience: the team didn't know what a parachute should look like or how the ground would be disturbed by the landing rockets. Lessons learned from observations of the Mars Exploration Rover landing sites helped team members identify what they think are the parachute, the rocket-blast zone, and ultimately the lander itself."

Late Breaking News:

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

Today the Council disclosed the news that the repulsive beings inhabiting the blue planet third from our star have located the wreckage of one of their invading spacecraft near our planet's southern pole.

Strangely enough, their newscasts mentioned nothing of the warning plaque errected alongside the downed invader.
Some scientists theorize that the translation of our warning into their bestial language was imperfect, while others maintain that the plaque is simply too small to be imaged properly with their feeble, childish astronomical instruments.

K'Breel, speaker for the Council, voiced another, more pesimistic theory:

"Certainly, beings who are capable of constructing and sending such fiendishly clever little devices to spy on our world are more than capable of receiving and understanding our warning. They have simply chosen to disregard it. Clearly we can no longer ignore the predaceous advances of the evil blue planet. The Council has given the final authorization to divert our asteroid into a collision course. We now need only wait."

Re:Late Breaking News:

[Androk (873765)]

K'Breel's opponent A'Ting says in typical liberal form, K'Breel is being to soft on the invaders. Nothing short of the devastation to the 5th planet will be acceptable, after all some could survive the asteroid collision. His quote "enviromental worries about a new asteroid belt blocking 5 to 10% of the sun are vastly over blown". More news as it comes...

A proposal

[JPelorat (5320)]

Change the project name to

Mars Polar Plummeter

and call it a "smashing success"!

Re: A Modest Proposal

[richie2000 (159732)]

Mars Deep Impact.

Re:A proposal

[vandon (233276)]

Who knew parachutes don't work as well in a thin atmosphere?

Re:A proposal

[deglr6328 (150198)]

The parachutes worked fine. The crash was caused by a tiny microswitch on one of the landing feet that was supposed to switch the engines off when it was clicked shut by touching rocks/dirt. It bounced shut 40M up because that's when the feet unfolded causing a slight jolt to the craft. No one anticipated that and the software was designed ONLY to say: switch closed=shut down engines now!

Before it gets Slashdotted...

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

Here's the text of the article:

In December 1999 NASA's Mars Polar Lander (MPL) was supposed to touch down near the red planet's south pole. But shortly after it entered the Martian atmosphere, the spacecraft disappeared without a trace. Only now, 5½ years later, do scientists think they may have finally located the lander's wreckage and confirmed what went wrong with the mission. The full report, by planetary scientist Michael C. Malin (Malin Space Science Systems), appears in the July 2005 issue of Sky & Telescope, now in press.

Malin used his company's Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor to search for the missing spacecraft in late 1999 and early 2000, but apparently came up empty. Shortly thereafter, a review board looking into the craft's disappearance reported what might have caused Mars Polar Lander's demise. The board suggested that MPL's landing rockets fired at the right time and altitude but cut off prematurely. They were suppose to continue firing until one of the craft's landing legs touched the surface. Apparently the onboard software mistook the jolt of landing-leg deployment for ground contact and shut down the engines, causing MPL to fall from a presumed height of 40 meters (130 feet).

Using information gained from observing the two Mars Exploration Rover landers last year, Malin reexamined the 1999 and 2000 images looking for similar features. This time he identified what looks to be a parachute located several hundred meters away from a disturbed bit of ground with a large mark in its center. The parachute-like feature closely matches the Mars Exploration Rover parachutes (which were made of the same materials), and Malin believes the disturbed ground matches what one would see if a rocket had blasted the surface from a height of tens of meters.

"It seems that the MPL investigation board may have been correct," writes Malin in Sky & Telescope. "MPL's descent proceeded more or less successfully through atmospheric entry and parachute jettison. It was only a few short moments before touchdown that disaster struck."

Later this year NASA will direct Mars Global Surveyor to reexamine the MPL crash site using a special technique to improve the camera's resolution to 0.5 meter per pixel. Malin hopes the new observations will provide the conclusive evidence needed to officially close the case of the missing Mars Polar Lander.

Re:Before it gets Slashdotted...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Michael Malin is an expert planetary scientist. A incredible number of discoveries in the geological history of Mars have been made by Malin and colleagues. It is unsuprising that his team was able to make this discovery. They rarely miss anything (making it hard for other planetary scientists studying Mars to find anything new--seriously!).

Here's the photo in case of Slashdotting

[WormholeFiend (674934)]

Photo: .

Enlarged: o

Re:Here's the photo in case of Slashdotting

[shawn(at)fsu (447153)]

Had they been able to read martian, they would have found it a lot sooner by just following the signs to "Jimbo's junk yand and space salvage, any part you want. You pull it $15"

Re:Here's the photo in case of Slashdotting

[KiloByte (825081)]

Beh. To me, both items look just like random rocks, similar to those you can find right in the neighbourhood. The rock on photo 2 is simply a bit bigger.

Perhaps my eyesight is just bad, but I wouldn't dare to call this data conclusive. Try again with a better resolution.

Better Photo

[Maddog Batty (112434)]

Better Photo: X

(it did crash after all!)

Can't Wait

[mattmentecky (799199)]

With businesses like http://www.marsshop.com/ [marsshop.com] selling acre tracts of Martian land, how long before we have someone claiming that the Mars Polar Lander wreckage belongs to them?

We have [usually sunken] treasure laws, accidentally-delivered-merchandise laws but we'll need an inter-planetary-law expert to sort this out, anyone knows a good one?

Oblig.

[Dachannien (617929)]

Leo Wong: We own entire western hemisphere. That the best hemisphere.
Professor Farnsworth: It's the same way on Earth.

Re:dibs

[lcsjk (143581)]

The main difference between a yard sale and yard trash is the distance from the curb.(unknown)

When you obtained your abandoned lawn mower from the roadside, was it by some coincidence still running and a lawn only partially cut?

Re:Can't Wait

[TGK (262438)]

Some countries have signed treaties saying they won't claim/weaponize space. Of course, some of those same countries signed treaties saying they wouldn't try to develop anti-ballistic missiles.

Under international law (specificly the treaty of London, 1600) a settlement, colony, or claim is only valid if the country in question has the means in palce to defend it.

In other words, should China (which didn't sign that whole "won't claim space" treaty) land on the Moon and claim it for China, it won't be recognised as Chinese property unless they bring along some effective means of keeping other people off of it.

Functionaly this leads to an anarchical environment. Wasn't such a bad idea in the 1600s, but when you're talking about the idea of carpet nuking someone's moon base into smoking oblivion to invalidate their claim to the place... well... things are different.

Re:Can't Wait

[HomerJayS (721692)]

To clarify a bit. Under the (admittedly impotent)1967 UN treaty. No NATION can claim ownership of space real-estate. Private entities are free to claim ownership, getting some legal entity to affirm said ownwership and enforcement are other issues altogether.

In reality, it means that whoever gets there first (be it a nation-state sponsored colony or private entity) can do pretty much do whatever they see fit once they are there.

Obligatory Link to the Lobbing Scorecard

[Old VMS Junkie (739626)]

For those of you keeping score in the grand game... http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/index.ht ml [anl.gov]

Direct link to data and photos at Malin Space

[CuriousKangaroo (543170)]

Here is the direct link to the Malin Space Science Systems page with the data and images.

In addition to MPL, they have found Viking 2.

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/05/05/ind ex.html [msss.com]

Cool stuff.

some scientists

[yodaj007 (775974)]

"the team didn't know what a parachute should look like"

This might help. [google.com]

Why the MPL crashed

[photonic (584757)]

I did read the failure investigation report (can be found here [klabs.org], search for polar) some time ago and IIRC the most probable failure scenario was a software error involving a single boolean:

MPL was to land under active control (with rocket power, not the air-bag trick). To kill the moter once it had touched down the legs contained contact sensors which were constructed of a pin with a spring, a magnet and a Hall-sensor. The legs were to be extended some time before touchdown.

The problem was the sensors would trigger some intermediate false readings during the leg extension. These false readings toggled a flag, which, once the control system first started looking for contact, immediately killed the engine, having the lander free-fall to death. Clearing the flag after the leg-extension would have saved the mission. The bug was not found because of errors in the software design documents and lack of a system level test. The intermediate false readings were found in a component level test, but its consequences somehow didn't made it in the final design.

Re:wait a minute ...

[v1 (525388)]

Agents will be arriving in a few minutes to correct this. Just remain seated in front of your computer.

Re:wait a minute ...

[Sirch (82595)]

Is this [space.com] what you are referring to?

Re:Testing!

[TrippTDF (513419)]

If only they had a sensor that measured constant force exterted on a landing leg insted of the short impulse of landing.

I'm willing to bet the team wanted to disrupt the surrounding area around the craft as little as poissible. If you wait for a an extended force, that's time that the craft is on the group firing it's rockets into the ground doing nothing but churning up the landscape.

Why is there not a standard design mars landing vehicle, one that can be used to deploy any payload upto say 8^3m meters in volume, it would solve a lot of issues and reduce the overall mission costs, if designed well it could be used to land on other bodies (moon/IO/Europa) with only a slight modification to fuel levels/Paracute size/airbag preasure.

There's no standard design because we're still looking for the best solution! We've only landed a handful of times. Don't forget it's not just the landing to consider, but how we get the thing there. The systems used for the Rovers did pretty well for themselves, and I bet we see more of the Bouncy-Ball design in the future. However, landing location has a lot to do with landing type. The ice caps might in general have too delicate of a surface to ensure the bouncy-ball design work well there.

I'm sure that with continued missions, a more standard solution will come into effect.

Re:Do I have this right? Parachute still white?

[east coast (590680)]

But the parachute that has been laying around for the last 5+ years is still in one piece, just as it fell, and is as white as can be...

From msss.com [msss.com] (where some images of the "wreck" can be seen):

"Shortly after the loss of Mars Polar Lander (MPL), the Mars Global Surveyor MOC was employed to acquire dozens of 1.5 m/pixel images of the landing uncertainty ellipses, looking for any evidence of the lander and its fate..."

These are not new images, just new finds on old images.