NIMA Locates The Mars Polar Lander

Skyshadow writes "Space.com is reporting that the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) believes they've located the Mars Polar Lander, intact on it's landing legs. They've apparently had their people looking for the lander in photos taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been tasked to take more photos of the landing area later this year."

Comments

Re:Am I the only one a bit freaked out by this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind the diffraction limit of a telescope (the angular size of the smallest items it can distinguish) is given by a very simple equation (theta = 1.22*lambda/diameter where theta is the resolution in radians, diameter is the diameter of the telescope's primary and is in the same units as lambda, the wavelength of light used). Long story short, if they did spot if from orbit, it had to be Mars orbit. A telescope orbiting Earth would have to be about 46 kilometers in diameter to physically resolve a 1-2 meter sized object at a distance of about 150 million kilometers with optical light (although you could also pull it off with two small telescopes 46 kilometers apart, but that is another story). And frankly, I have a hard time imagining they did it from Mars orbit, although at least in that case, it is physically possibile (Mars observer does have very high resolution imaging capability).

Oh darnit

[gavinhall]

Posted by IWAssassin:

Oops I dropped my multi-billion dollar probe, now where'd it go? Wait I think I found it, maybe hmm dunno. Ah well... Hey it's a great thing they have possibly found it, well sorta. The space probe is still a practical loss if they can't raise the thing on communications till we send someone up there to fix it, and at the current rate that will be NEVER. Reason we made it to the moon was a race of pride with the Russians, we can never do something just for the sake of it being good for the human Race, it has to be to show other humans we're better than them. Well some day geeks will inherit the earth and we will go up there and fix our broken multi-billion dollar probe!

Re:Because it may be found doesn't mean it'll work

[jafac]

When a person lands on mars, they'll be able to go to the probe and -- it, and THEN it will work.

It's just in a blue-funk.

Re:Am I the only one a bit freaked out by this?

[Bruce Perens]

I really appreciate the technical nature of your comment. We don't see enough of this on Slashdot any longer.

What about an optical interferometer?

Thanks

Bruce

I am freaked out by the patience this would take.

[Bruce Perens]

Given the amount of time spent, I suspect that this was largely a manual (or should I say "ocular"?) process. Had it been computer pattern matching, I would have expected the task to have run in a month at maximum, after all they are expected to handle terestrial images within hours and they must have some reserve capacity. Finding it in a month would tell us little about how fast they can process images, so I don't think they would have held off publishing the data, had they found it.

I think this was people, not computers, going over images for a long time.

I find it difficult to imagine having the patience to do that, but no doubt such people are employed by the government.

Bruce

The canals of Mars

[roystgnr]

I meant to say canyons and such, but my grasp of the English language seemed to escape me at that moment.

That's OK; it's an honest mistake. An ironic one, too. Giovanni Schiaparelli (I would have never remembered his name; yay Google!) saw the optical illusion of lines criss-crossing Mars and called them "canali": a word that means "channels", but was mistranslated "canals". In English, "channels" generally means any fluid passage, but "canals" implies a water passage of artificial origin. So all the 19th century wonder about intelligent life on Mars was first sparked by an English mistranslation of someone else's language.

And doubly ironic, there are channels on Mars. They might be from lava flows instead of water, and they're much smaller than the optical illusions some squinting pre-Space Age astronomers saw, but they are there.

Re:I am freaked out by the patience this would tak

[crisco]

I got the impression from the article that it was a somewhat 'backburner' type of job, not a mandate of "Find this spacecraft now" but "If ya get a chance, take a look through these NASA images and see if you can find anything".

If my job consisted of examining images of Iraqi and Chinese air bases and munitions plants, I'd probably welcome some Martian landscape for a change.

Of course, I could be all off in this...

Re:Wait a minute...

[Chris Burke]

Geeze, you already had it spelled out for you.

They have enough detail to see a thing that looks like it has tripod legs. Based on what they see, if it is the Lander, then it's sitting upright on its legs. If it isn't the Lander, then it's just something that happens to look like it has legs in a picture taken from orbit. It isn't incrongruous to say both, because there is a non-zero probability of each case.

Just because we see something that looks like a face on Mars doesn't mean it is a face. They're just being more careful in their declaration than, apparently, you would be.

This is the NRO and they can do this.

[gelfling]

And they were reading newspapers from orbit almost 40 years ago. It doesn't shock me when they say they can pick out a car sized object from a coupla hundred million miles away.

Re:I am freaked out by the patience this would tak

[mattkime]

I think this was people, not computers, going over images for a long time.

I find it difficult to imagine having the patience to do that, but no doubt such people are employed by the government.

Interns.

Image clarity not only issue

[Goonie]

Disclaimer: I have no special knowledge in the areas of photo interpretation or geology, but to me there seem to be several common-sense reasons why good imagery doesn't give you all the answers.

Even if you had centimetre-resolution images of Mars, that's not necessarily going to tell you whether canals were formed by water. Why? Because it only shows what's there. It doesn't necessarily show you how it got to be that way.

Secondly, on Earth, you can use aerial imagery of well-known areas to learn what certain features look like, and then extrapolate to other areas. On Mars, we have (by comparison) bugger-all ground-based imagery, let alone extensive studies of geology and the like, to use to do extrapolation.

Re:Image clarity not only issue

[DHartung]

Goonie wrote:
Even if you had centimetre-resolution images of Mars, that's not necessarily going to tell you whether canals were formed by water. Why? Because it only shows what's there. It doesn't necessarily show you how it got to be that way.

Yep. Actually, the bigger problem is that on Earth, we can observe features over time to determine how they are changing. There are geologic processes on Mars, but they will move glacially by comparison. We can't observe the Valles Marineris canyon system over time and see processes like erosion and sublimation, because they aren't happening -- or if they are, it's on a scale of tenths of a percent as fast as on Earth. So even observation over time is largely denied us as a tool.
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Re:Image clarity not only issue

[MadAhab]

Well, then, let's abandon all astronomy. After all, pictures of stars and galaxy clusters don't show you how they got to be that way. And forget geology, because most stuff happens too slowly to observe.

Seriously, it's called making theories based on observations. If you see a big rock with a big groove in the earth near it, you might conclude the rock was moved, say, by a glacier. On the other hand, if there's a nearby lava flow, maybe it was moved by volcanic processes.

That's a slightly silly example, but the point is that better data is really valuable. If anything, our experience correlating aerial views with ground views on earth provides a powerful reality check against our interpretations of mars photos from space.

Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

Well...

[RasputinAXP]

at least we know Xenu didn't get it.
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Re:Image clarity...

[DHartung]

Hey, you're forgiven ... as somebody else noted, there are channel and canyon features on Mars, just not the ones that Schiaparelli thought he saw (and that Percival Lowell was convinced were created by intelligent life).

See Mars in Popular Culture for the origin of the term.

To have some final fun with the idea, sf writer Kim Stanley Robinson envisioned a colonized Mars with free waters restored, creating not only oceans and crater lakes, but a system of manmade canals to connect them! See Blue Mars.
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Re:Am I the only one a bit freaked out by this?

[DHartung]

NIMA isn't using telescopes. They are using their crack photographic analysis skills (case in point: hey, JFK, there are missiles in Cuba!) to analyze the photography of the Mars Orbiter Camera onboard Global Surveyor.

This isn't a dig at NASA; NASA simply turned to the agency with the best equipment and experience in the task at hand. The bigger dig at NASA here may be that the lander's failure was misdiagnosed after all.
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Re:Image clarity...

[DHartung]

It's one thing to have an image; it's another to interpret the results. Two scientific teams working from different points of view could come up with incompletely consistent conclusions from the same data.

We do know that Mars had water, and probably still has some; we just don't know how much, we don't know how recently, and we don't know how important it was in shaping the Martian surface. If it's not on the surface, or in the atmosphere, has it bled away to space, or is a large amount still encased in the ground? The results from the Global Surveyor cameras have only just begun to be analyzed in a rigorous fashion, and the scientific results you look for will be forthcoming over the next several years. Just don't expect pat answers.

Anyway, uh, canals? There ARE no canals on Mars, kiddo. Maybe you should get your astronomy books more recent than 100 years old.
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Does NASA have another MPL?

[EvlG]

The linked article seems to indicate that NASA has another, identical MPL sitting there unused because they presume that the first one failed for mechanical reasons. However, if this is true, that the MPL landed safely, and we just can't communicate with it, then that means we just need to fix the comms gear and then we can send the other MPL out to do the first one's job.

Can anyone confirm whether there is another MPL craft, and if the finding that the first MPL landed OK would mean the mission could be tried again?

Re:Does NASA have another MPL?

[tesserae]

Lockheed Martin has the 2001 lander (virtually identical to the MPL), which was never launched because of the failure of the MPL. Basically, NASA freaked out over the MPL/Climate Orbiter failures, and refused to launch the next one... very typical of post-Challenger NASA.

It's mostly politics: JPL's Climate Orbiter failed, too, and JPL did one of the investigations into the two failures. Basically, they whitewashed their problems and crapped all over LockMart for what were very similar failings... not to excuse LockMart's bungling, just to point out another trait which NASA persistently exhibits.

If indeed the Young report's conclusions were correct, a line of code in the system controller's program would fix the problem: basically, when the legs deploy they tend to set the switches which tell the vehicle it's landed, thereby shutting down the landing motors as soon as they ignite -- simply reseting the registers after leg deployment does the job. In this case, LockMart wants to fix the code, and wants NASA to launch it (well, at least some of the LockMart employees want this).

If NIMA has found the MPL as described, however, then something else is wrong and there's no point in launching another (possibly fundamentally-defective) spacecraft. The Young report was pretty scathing: both JPL's MCO and LockMart's MPL were built for less than the wildly-successful Pathfinder lander, and both projects suffered from lack of supervision by experienced planetary spacecraft engineers, and from inadequate testing. It's not clear that all the potential problems have been identified, so NASA's decision to cancel the 2001 lander's launch may be a good call -- I have mixed feelings about it.

But in any case, NIMA's "discovery" is extremely tentative (despite the ridiculously misleading headline (for shame, /.!), and I wouldn't base any decision on it at the moment. Something tells me that NASA won't launch it under any circumstances, especially given the Bush administration's attitudes toward NASA in general... more's the pity.

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Re:Image clarity...

[spectecjr]

If NASA is able to spot a polar lander from orbital photography, why do we still have all these disputes over the history of mars; i.e. whether or not Mars had water, whether canals were formed by water, etc.

Uhhh... what canals?

Lowell had a dodgy telescope.

martian canals ('canali')


Optical illusions, produced by telescopic viewing of Mars with a resolution of poorer than about 100 km, first reported by Schiaparelli ('canali' is the Italian for 'channels') and especially championed by Percival Lowell (1855 - 1916). These observers produced maps of the martian surface showing interconnected networks of canals, implying the presence of intelligent life on Mars. The intelligence which devised the canals was, however, on the terrestrial side of the telescope.

A Dictionary of Earth Sciences, © Oxford University Press 1999

Re:Clarification...

[Malcontent]

I hate "journalism" like this. Why even report something using words like "may have". It conveys nothing. "monkeys may have flown out of butt" yes folks that's a true statement. I see this all time on talk-tv especially on fox. Most of their analysts are very fond of saying "may-have" when they just want to smear someone without presenting evidence. Too bad americans are so easily fooled by these weasel words.

Anyone have data on NIMA?

[TrevorB]

OK, let's do a search... Aha! www.nima.mil. The site seems relatively sparse of information, but not surprising for a site that claims it is 'representing a fundamental step toward achieving the Department of Defense vision of "dominant battle space awareness." ' :)

You have to think that while there are several experts in the world who can probably spot this kid of thing from a photograph using the human eye, a lot of what they do is computer based. I wonder if "working in their spare time for fun" involved putting the highres files through their supercomputers during some spare CPU cycles...

I'm not surprised that most of the people at JPL are going "Yeah, right". I'm assuming the image analysis people at NASA are mostly geologists. Picking out small objects in that kind of picture is a completely different skillset. It's going to take a while for NIMA to convince JPL of what they may have found.

Statement of engineers on landing day:

[PhatKat]

Ok everyone, remember where we parked...

Keck Interferometer -- In Space?

[Baldrson]

The military guys could be getting ridiculously high resolution with a space-based version of the Keck Interferometer. Such a space-based long-baseline optical system has been proposed by several authorities in the past -- it's just that NASA has never seen fit to fly such a system -- for some reason. The proposals I've seen claim you can gang up a whole bunch of small mirrors into a huge light-gathering interferometer as long as you have them laser-linked to each other to maintain their configuration. I suspect this means the military interferometer is in a high orbit -- possibly even a Lagrange point.

Re:let the thing die

[JWW]

Perhaps this could provide proof that the Martian probe deactivation beam truly works!! ;-)

Re:is it?

[TopShelf]

On that score, internet journalism is no worse than print or TV...

Next mission

[heikkile]

To land near the MPL, locate it, and find out *how* the Martians shot it down. This without suffering the same fate... For that they will be needing more support from the .mil guys.

Sad thing, that the first contact had to be so hostile.

Re:let the thing die

[The Red One]

The polar lander crashed. It was given up for dead. Have some respect for it.

There are several good reasons to find out if the lander really did crash as people had thought up until now, or if some other failure caused it to lose contact with NASA. Firstly, if it did land correctly, NASA would know that their design is sound, and they don't have to spend millions of dollars re-inventing a new landing system. They can just re-use the same technology from the polar lander. Secondly, if it lost contact for some other reason, surely it would be a good idea to find out what that reason is (to avoid wasting resources in creating a new lander that fails in exactly the same way).

Am I the only one a bit freaked out by this?

[ca1v1n]

Ok, so an agency that mostly works on images of Earth has found something on Mars. I'm guessing that they were using images taken from Mars orbit. If they were using their own equipment, then that means that they have telescopes a million times more powerful than what NASA has. I'm taking a wild guess that this is not the case, but if so, that's pretty spooky. Regardless, they have lots of expertise finding stuff on earth, but they were out of their element here. The fact that they did something on NASA's turf that NASA couldn't do tells you where the big money is going.

Re:Am I the only one a bit freaked out by this?

[Bluesee]

If you've ever seen some of the interpretations of some of those PI guys, you would be amazed. The level of incredulousness is, well, incredulous.

"See this thing here? That's an underground base. You can tell by the indentation... here... which is a vent..."

It's all you can do to stop from saying "Give me a frikkin' break here! You guys are totally making this stuff up!"

But they have years of PI experience and seem pretty confident in what they do. It's like having your doctor go over your x-rays with you. You're looking at white patterns on a black background. But they can see things you never thought possible.

It is a good testament to the power of the human mind. I bet no computer AI could ever gain the insight the human mind can in these fields. Remember the sonar guy in (the BOOK) "Hunt for Red October"? How he could hear a whale fart from 100 miles and tell you shich kind of whale and what he had for breakfast? heh, that kind of thing...

And in other news

[Salsaman]

NASA also reported a strange black monolith right next to the lander.

Since nasa are running out of money...

[grahamsz]

... I wonder if i'll be able to contract out nima and have them analyse digital photos of my apartment to find my car keys. That would be a truely wonderful use of space age technology.

In related news....

[slashdoter]

Nasa claims now that they know the cause for the non functional probe. Nasa has discribed a " little green hacker seating next to the probe. NASA has discribed the little green guy as a "teenage student picked on by his peers"......

________

Because it may be found doesn't mean it'll work...

[FortKnox]

I see a lot of people getting the wrong idea here.

There are too many posts stating "Now we can get it up and running!" The problem was never "we can't find it to operate it", it was "we can't contact it to operate it." If it, actually, *is* the polar lander (it isn't a positive ID, yet), and it is intact and landed properly, it just explains that the problem wasn't a crash, but, in fact, a software problem. NASA didn't test it thoroughly enough.

Sure, they will try and contact it again, but don't be surprised when it doesn't magically come to life now that they (possibly) know where it is.

--

Image clarity...

[Daemosthenes]

If NASA is able to spot a polar lander from orbital photography, why do we still have all these disputes over the history of mars; i.e. whether or not Mars had water, whether canals were formed by water, etc. It just seems like they would be able to determine it with that kind of image clarity. Perhaps someone more informed on the subject could elaborate...

Wait a minute...

[Flat5]

How the hell can they not be sure that they're seeing the polar lander, yet at the same time report that it is "sitting upright on its tripod legs"!?!

"Ok, yeah, see that lander thing there sitting upright on its tripod legs? We suspect that might be one of NASA's craft, maybe even the polar lander that was supposed to land in that spot, which had tripod legs on which it was supposed to sit. But then again, we're just not sure... our crack 'mars lander-type objects sitting on tripod legs' team is working on it right now!"

Flat5

Re:Clarification...

[tswinzig]

Too bad americans are so easily fooled by these weasel words.

You may have a point.

Then again, what proof do you have that Americans are so much more gullible than any other nationality?

I think a better statement would be: It's too bad PEOPLE are so easily fooled by these weasel words.

And that's because people are not skeptical enough.

Cracked!!!

[Flavius Stilicho]

I wish I could take credit for this but it was posted by an AC way back.... it may be closer to the truth than anyone could have guessed:

"150 years from now when men find the crashed probe on mars, the LCD display will probably read: PH33R /\/\y 31337 h4x0r1n6 5K1LLZ!
- K1n6 Kr4x0r! 1999"

Re:Clarification...

[American AC in Paris]

I hate "journalism" like this. Why even report something using words like "may have". It conveys nothing...Too bad americans are so easily fooled by these weasel words.

"Hey, slow down a bit. That bridge may have iced over."

"Silence, foolish American! You convey nothing! I will not be fooled by your weasel word--*CRUNCH*

Re:let the thing die

[ishrat]

"If found intact, it would mean that we would have to re examine our most probable cause of failure."

That should be reason enough.

/. overstating the situation grossly

[CrimsonHat]

"If anybody is saying that they have definitively proved to [the] 99 percentile that Mars Polar Lander has or hasn't been found, they are overstating the situation grossly," Weiler said.

According to the /. headline, it HAS been found. Anybody else get the feeling that things around here get overstated from time to time?

New /. Poll

[OpCode42]

Where would you expect to find the mars polar lander?

Behind the fridge

Clamped in a parking lot

trolling on slashdot

CowboyNeal

Mars

Seemed pretty obvious to me.... CowboyNeal! ;-)

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