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Space United States Science

NASA's Mars Polar Lander May Have Landed Safely 61

Posted by timothy from the your-tax-dollars-in-limbo dept.
JabberBoi writes "On January 3, 1999, NASA lost contact with the Mars Polar Lander after it was supposed to land on Mars. An assessment report by NASA suggested that the lander's legs may have sent an incorrect signal to the craft's computer, which in turn caused a premature shutdown of its landing engines -- resulting in the craft crashing on Mars. However, according to this article from Space.com, analysis of images of the Polar Lander's assumed landing site area obtained by the Mars Global Explorer were sent to a U.S. 'spy' agency called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) to determine if any signs of wreckage or the spacecraft could be discerned through pixel analysis. The article describes NIMA as an 'acclaimed leader in describing, assessing, and visually depicting physical features on Earth' from imagery taken by spy satellites. NIMA's report states that the images they analyzed suggest a successful landing based on identification of three separate parts of the Mars Polar Lander: an upright Polar Lander, and two 'pixel return' signatures that suggest the lander's parachute and heat shield. These findings suggest that something else may have caused the Polar Lander mission to fail. Conspiracy theories about why the Polar Lander never called home abound."
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NASA's Mars Polar Lander May Have Landed Safely More

NASA's Mars Polar Lander May Have Landed Safely

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  • Interesting polar ice cap picture (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aurum42 ( 712010 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:26PM (#7791334)
    The "conspiracy theories" link has an interesting picture at the very bottom, of a site near the martian polar ice cap. It does look a lot like plant life, but I suppose it could also be some sort of striated rock formation. Does anyone know if that site or something nearby is going to be investigated by any of the landers approaching Mars this month?

    • Re:Interesting polar ice cap picture (Score:4, Informative)

      by Nasarius ( 593729 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @09:06PM (#7791589)
      Take anything that EnterpriseMission says with several kilos of salt. Look at the rest of their website, and tell me if you still think that they're remotely credible.

      For example:
      http://www.enterprisemission.com/paper_1/paper_1.p hp?page=paper1 [enterprisemission.com]
      http://www.enterprisemission.com/millenn5.htm [enterprisemission.com]
      http://www.planetarymysteries.com/egypt/sphinxmars .html [planetarymysteries.com] Yeah...right.

      • Well, they definitely seem to be infected with Extreme Kookiness, but I don't see any fake pictures purporting to be authentic images of Mars, so I'm still interested in learning what exactly there is at that site :-)
    • I don't know about that area in particular but the Mars Express orbiter is mapping the entire sufrace to 10 meters and big chunks of it to 2 meters (both in 3d) so maybe you'll get lucky.

    • Re:Interesting polar ice cap picture (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cmjensen ( 30043 ) * <cjensen@acm.org> on Monday December 22, 2003 @09:20PM (#7791654)
      The "interesting image" on the conspiracy theory website at least has the decency to link to the original source at NASA [msss.com]. If you follow the NASA link you too can discover a little piece of info that the conspiracists can't be bothered to tell you: in the narrow direction, the image of "plant life" is 2.83 kilometers across! This means each of those big bundles in the image is about 1000 meters/yards.... which is the same as ten American football fields put end-to-end.

      That'd be a really big freaking tree. Or you might consider that it's a reasonable size for a geological feature.

      Moral of the story: unless you have experience in interpreting geology from biology when looking at Earth images, you probably shouldn't bother trying to use Mars as your first experience in interpreting aerial imagery.

      I know nothing about interpreting these images. Me, all I see is two different surface types. One of which sometimes is round with radial patterns in it. It means nothing to me.

      • Re:Interesting polar ice cap picture (Score:5, Insightful)

        by meta-monkey ( 321000 ) * on Monday December 22, 2003 @09:39PM (#7791734) Journal
        Not only that, but, seriously...if NASA did find plant life on Mars, I think they'd be screaming it from the rooftops, and more importantly, in front of congressional budget hearings. Imagine:

        NASA Rep: Life on Mars!! Look, pictures of plant life! We want to go there!
        Representative: Here's gobs of cash!!

        Obviously, NASA has not found pictures of life on Mars.

      • Re:Interesting polar ice cap picture (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        2.38 across the imaging area that one lone blob looks more to be about 200-250 meters across - considering the sizes of some of the trees here on earth it would not be impossible to have a tree witha radius (viewed from the top) of that size.

        thus i would not say it is "impossible" just highly improbable... then again there don't seem to have been a lumberjack anywhere in site for a very long time to prevent such a conclusion

        how come they never land anywhere near things as interesting as that - even if it
        • Yes, and no less an authority than Arthur C. Clarke found them interesting enough to comment on. Symmetry of any sort is interesting, and yes that sort of radial symmetry could easily be a geological formation, but what if it isn't? And it certainly doesn't have to be a single "plant", in the unlikely event that it is not a geologic formation.
          • I wasn't aware that Arthur C. Clarke was an "authority" on aerial photography :-).

            And yes, the radial symetrey is very interesting! And to my mind, that alone makes it a worthwhile target for the new High-Resolution orbiter than will be at Mars soon. However, I find it difficult to beleive that any crystaline formation could manage to stay symetric as it grows to a kilometer across; impurities and landform deformations alone should cause major asymetries.

            On the other hand, I can think of dozens of ge

      • A Fungal, crystal, or bio-bloom on top of the ice could easily be that large if it received no competition, and had enough nutrients. It's not a buch, because there is no shadow to speak of. It does resemble a crystal growth quite closely. It even has the fractal edges to it. I don't know what it is, but I can't dismiss it quite as easily.


        • At poles to get water, black to absorb heat (uh, hello), bunched to save heat and reproduce, and apparently the growth follows the wind pattern (or is that wind pattern a vestige of the camera?). (Polar bears are white so maybe the heat is in another spectrum we do not see.)

          Methinks we are all too simplistic... if you look at the picture on the "conspiracy" site the blob approaching from the bottom left appears to have a face. These things are actually enormous bison-like creatures and I suppose they move
    • I dunnot about that, but this one [msss.com] looks like the lander caught fire. =P

      Wait, maybe that's why the probe is "silent"...
      They found oil!
    • Did you ever see "Tremors"?

      A giant underground worm heard it crash land, rushed towards it, and gobbled it up. See the worm path going roughly west to east on this photo, and see the horrible distruction at the end:
      http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m07_m12/medi ummaps /M11/M1104327.jpg

      YAW.

  • Oh, wait, this is /., not Fark.

  • WOW!!! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Will2k_is_here ( 675262 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @08:30PM (#7791357)
    If NIMA can discern wreckage (or lack thereof) on a small space craft on Mars based on those photos, I wonder what they can see here on earth.

    • Re:WOW!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      the tops of our heads! The tops of our buildings!. So long as the terrorists (tm) operate in a 2D-pacman-like grid and never work in buildings or go underground in a subway, we're safe!

    • Re:WOW!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @09:26PM (#7791684)
      If NIMA can discern wreckage (or lack thereof) on a small space craft on Mars based on those photos...

      Then why don't they show us the photos? I mean, we (and this includes professional astronomers) have not seen any satellite photogrgaps of the Martian surface with enough detail to make a determination like "the lander is upright on its three legs," like NIMA said. So either they're full of sh*t, or they and maybe NASA as well are classifying photographs from the Martian surface. Why, so the terrorists can't use them for evil? If you're a US taxpayer who financed everything that NIMA and NASA does, you should be mad!

      • That's a poor argument, because our tax money goes to fund top military technology, and yet we have no access to them, their photos, their descriptions, or even acknowledgments of their existence, in some instances. Perhaps there is life on Mars; it is very probable. It is also possible that the United States wants to eventually get the upper hand in capitalizing on Mars and its resources and is taking steps to discourage other capable countries (Russia, Japan, UK, et centera) from benefiting equally. After

      • Re:WOW!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by kalidasa ( 577403 ) * on Monday December 22, 2003 @10:59PM (#7792093) Journal
        The source photos probably are available to us (including those who are professional astronomers); it's the analysis algorithms used by NIMA that wouldn't be.
      • Knowing the capabilities of NIMA's image analisys could potentially be like "showing your cards". But my guess is just that the people who work at NIMA just grew up watching scrambled porn and are therefore better at deciphering blurry images. In related news, they said the parachute looked like a big booby.
      • Did you at all RTFA? Wait, this is /. so of course you didn't.

        It clearly states how they came up with their theory of the final outcome of MPL. Since you will probably never read the article, here you go...

        The craft seperated into three pieces on entry: heat shield, parachute and MPL. The shield and MPL will be no larger than a single pixel in the images, and the parachute will only be a few pixels if fully spread out.

        The heat shield just falls off and crash lands... they *think* they see some ground
        • Ok, if this is directed at me, I feel compelled to rebuttle. I did read the article. What I stated still holds true even after your post. Nima analyzed the photos and decided that the craft did land as expected and thus something else caused the spacecraft to malfunction. It was belived that it crashed on impact and that is the reason it didn't work. Therefore, they were able to find no unexpected damage. (ie. lack thereof).

          The images are available (linked in the Slashdot article) and after viewing them, I
    • Mobile chemical weapons production labs and kebab vans.

      Sometimes they get the two confused though.

      YAW.

  • Martians exist. (Score:3, Funny)

    by ForestGrump ( 644805 ) on Monday December 22, 2003 @09:09PM (#7791609) Homepage Journal
    yea, they sabatoged the mission.
    The longer they can delay us from further probing their planet, the longer they can keep their privacy.

    Note to space programs.
    Martians want to be left alone. maybe the man on the moon is more friendly to us.

    -Grump
  • COOL I never new that.

  • Darn it! (Score:4, Funny)

    by skookum ( 598945 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @01:49AM (#7792780)
    In a December 2002 article in
    Geospatial Intelligence Review ...
    Darn it! Wouldn't you know it, just when I let my subscription run out. I mean they had a few pretty good articles but there were just too many ads, you couldn't take their opinions seriously. It was just turning into one of those trashy Geospatial Intelligence tabloids that you always see in the checkout aisle. Oh well. At least I still have all the back issues from 1986 on.
    • I mean they had a few pretty good articles but there were just too many ads, you couldn't take their opinions seriously.

      Your not supposed to take the comments section seriously.

      Oh, you meant some paper magazine, not slashdot...
  • Is this along the lines of Windows 95/98's message, "The system is busy or has become unstable." That it can't tell the difference between those two conditions is might scary. :(

  • As mentioned in the article (Score:4, Funny)

    by ColaMan ( 37550 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @05:24AM (#7793329) Journal
    It looks like to really find out what happend, we'll have to wait (as NIMA suggests) until a visiting mars mission drops by the landing/crash site.....

    Searcher #1: "There it is , over near that rock."

    Searcher #2: "Hey look - the antenna didn't deploy! Give that antenna a thump and I'll reset that circuit breaker."

    (Searcher #1 kicks lander hard... After a pause , the antenna slowly deploys)

    Searcher #2: "Ah, there it goes! Hey, let's not tell the guys at mission control we found it, they'll freak when they hear it talking again!"

    Searcher #1 to Mission Control: "Sorry , Control, that's a negative on grid number 41. No lander here."

    (Searchers depart the area, giggling.)

  • Interesting conclusion (Score:5, Interesting)

    by grozzie2 ( 698656 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:14AM (#7793556)
    They have some digital pictures from mars. Read the articles carefully, there's no mention of camera calibrations, and they do not rule out the possibility of 'camera noise', which is indicative of non availability of camera calibration data. There is no mention of the possibility of transmission noise on the long haul back to earth from there, altho it's possible the digital system in use is error free.

    Look carefully at the data presented. At site 3 they have one bright pixel. This they have extrapolated to be a high speed impact, complete with ground scarring. Sounds like a pretty powerful computer model they are using if it can deduce all of that from a single data point of one bright pixel. It sure seems to be able to fill in a lot of blanks from absolutely zero supporting data.

    Site 2 has 2 bright pixels. From this they have deduced that the lander is sitting intact on it's 3 little legs. That's quite an astounding conclusion for such a minimal amount of data. Again, it begs the question, just how much 'filling in the gaps' is that computer model doing ?

    This really makes me wonder, after all, these are the folks doing image analysis for intelligence purposes. 3 pixels on a 1.5 meter resolution is enough to conclude there is a lander sitting upright, and a high speed impact 3 miles away, yet they cannot seem to locate the 6 meter diameter parachute that should still be attached to the much smaller unit they have 'identified'. Gotta wonder, if they can find a lander that's 2 meters, based on 1.5 meter pixel data, why cant they locate a 6 meter object that's not possibly any farther away than the length of the cords attaching it? this should be childs play, because it's going to occupy no less than 8 pixels, and likely it should occupy 12 of them. The location of the parachute should provide more supporting data than all the rest of the data they have combined, yet they cant find it.

    This is a very interesting insight to the methodology in use by this agency, begs a few questions about the rest of thier work. Are these folks normally in the habit of drawing conclusions based on extrapolated data obtained from uncalibrated visual systems ? Do they normally draw conclusions from incomplete data, even tho there is strong evidence to suggest the conclusion is not correct, based on the missing correlation data that should be present (missing parachute).

    These are interesting academic questions, until you put the final perspective on it. The conclusions this intelligence agency draws, become part of the basis for starting wars.

    • Re:Interesting conclusion (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mr. Dop ( 708162 ) on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @08:32AM (#7793776)
      This is a very interesting insight to the methodology in use by this agency, begs a few questions about the rest of thier work. Are these folks normally in the habit of drawing conclusions based on extrapolated data obtained from uncalibrated visual systems ? Do they normally draw conclusions from incomplete data, even tho there is strong evidence to suggest the conclusion is not correct, based on the missing correlation data that should be present (missing parachute).

      Speaking from experience, yes.

      What they are supposed to do is to look at only the evidence presented and not draw a conclusion. What I have seen more often is that they are presented with a theory and they look for supporting evidence, which is human nature. This is one of the reasons why I got out of that business, the lack of objectivity.

      These are interesting academic questions, until you put the final perspective on it. The conclusions this intelligence agency draws, become part of the basis for starting wars.

      One only has to look at recent history to find out how true that statement is.


    • This is a very interesting insight to the methodology in use by this agency

      I believe that you failed to account for the fact that these pictures, and the methodology used to analyze them, were scrubbed of sensitive data for public consumption. They may well have obfuscated some information in order to protect their methodology or even their technical ability. I wouldn't be too quick to jump to conclusions based on what they chose to release, realizing that they may well have kept the most interesting a
    • Have confidence won't you! Ie. look at all the weapons of mass destruction these very same intelligence agencies found in Iraq, using these very same advanced image analysis techniques!

      [sarcasm off]

    • Well, if we can assume that the lander did hit the Martian surface and didn't burn up, skip off the atmosphere, etc, then it has to be somewhere on Mars. One bright pixel might be enough to show an impact point, because there's not going to be a debris trail if the probe didn't open up, it's just going to slag itself into the ground and mostly contain itself. Two bright pixels just might be enough if the lander opens itself more than the resolution of the camera. Who knows? Perhaps there's something they'r

  • no longer NIMA (Score:4, Interesting)

    by djdead ( 135363 ) <seth.wenchel@com> on Tuesday December 23, 2003 @07:32AM (#7793606)
    Just an FYI to all the /.'ers, the group formerly known as NIMA has changed its name to the National Geospacial Agency, or NGA.
    • Yeah, and thank god they didn't change it to the Geospatial-Intelligence National Agency of America (GNAA). That would have shot this story into the gutter.

      p
  • Isn't this the same lander that had the metric verses imperial measurement issue?

    So, I now believe the real problem is it can't decide whether to boot linux or windows before sending info back.

    Either that, or it just blew up with shiny bits scattered around.
    • Mars Climate Orbiter suffered from the metric/imperial conversion snafu. See - http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco990930.html

      The official hypothesis for MPL is that when its landing legs deployed the "thunk" sent spurious "touchdown" data to the guidance system, which, beleiving the lander was on the ground, shutdown the descent engine prematurely, resulting in.. well.. another crater on Mars.

  • This [nasa.gov] appears to be the joint press release referred to in the space.com article. It diplomatically states that NASA believes that the features detected by the NIMA analysis could be noise in the camera system (don't they have multiple images to use? seems unlikely that there could be a recurring noise pattern over the same pixels).
  • How far are the rovers going to be?

  • This is why we need... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by herrvinny ( 698679 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2003 @07:56PM (#7805752)
    This is why we need a comprehensive satellite array around Mars before we start firing probes down. What we should do, IMHO, is create a ring of support satellites around Mars with everything imaginable, cameras of every kind, return to Earth containers, etc. That way, when we crash probes onto Mars, we can intensively photograph and document everything. What have we learned from this failure? Absolutely nothing. If the probe really is intact, why aren't we receiving anything? We haven't learned anything because we can't go back, look at the actual probe, and do tests, etc. At least if we had a satellite ring, we could do more documentation.
    And when the probes land successfully, we can save space and power on the probes by just having enough power to send signals to the satellites, which then boost the signal and fire back to Earth.

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