Crowdsourced Effort May Have Found Soviet Mars Mission's Remains

A story at Slashgear says that the remains of a Soviet mission to Mars may have been spotted — on Mars — by enthusiasts poring over old photos taken by a NASA orbiter. The article points out that the find must be confirmed by further imaging, but matches the seekers' expectations. From the article: "The community at VK.com/Curiosity_Live crowdsourced a mission to find the Soviet Union’s long-lost Mars 3 spacecraft, with the site’s leader, Vitali Egorov of St. Petersburg, Russia, creating models of what hardware from the spacecraft should look like. With this reference, the community combed through a large image taken five years ago by NASA’s MRO, identifying what is believed to be the craft’s parachute, lander, terminal retrorocket, and heat shield."

Re:Any Russians?

[Luckyo]

Technically this is true. When an object lands on Mars, Mars lands on the object. They both have gravitational fields which attract one another.

Whether this means that Earth has also gone Soviet is up to debate.

Re:Any Russians?

[ProzacPatient]

It adds a whole new meaning to "The RED planet."

Re:

[Tablizer]

So I'm not sleeping on the bed, the bed is sleeping on me?

Re:

[Tablizer]

You are full of sheet!

Stranfe quote FTA:

[lxs]

"The HiRISE image in which the possible spacecraft parts were discovered is massive with 1.8 million pixels, which NASA says would require approximately 2500 average computer monitors to view."

I guess that is 2500 monitors at NASA or 1 smartphone. Please tell me that it should be 1.8 billion pixels.

Re:Stranfe quote FTA:

[lxs]

Turns out the number of 1.8 billion is stated correctly in the original press release.

Mars 3

[nvn]

Here is full story with nice pictures (google translate from russian) http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=ru&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://habrahabr.ru/post/175827/ [google.com]

Great news

[Nidi62]

Now when Val Kilmer goes to Mars he will know where to look so he can get back to Trinity on the ship! If only we can just keep the government from developing AIMEE.

Mars 3 = First Soft Lander on Mars

[thrich81]

This shouldn't be news to anyone, but Mars 3 wasn't just any old mission. It was the first soft lander on Mars. Transmitted data for about 14-15 seconds, then ceased for unknown reasons.

Re:

[Tablizer]

Transmitted data for about 14-15 seconds, then ceased for unknown reasons.

One theory was that a dust-storm knocked it over or caused static charges, killing it. There were known dust-storms in the general area during the mission (seen from Earth scopes as a pale obscuring of the usual dark areas).

Another theory, at the time, was that it landed in a kind of "quick sand". Because of this theory, the US Viking probes were programmed to immediately take and send images of a lander foot-pad so that if it did sin