Slashdot Mirror
NASA's Mars Polar Lander May Have Landed Safely
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."
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?
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
Oh, wait, this is /., not Fark.
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.
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
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
COOL I never new that.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
The conspiracy theorists have always asserted that the men in black don't think we're ready to know about alien life. This is why they go to such extreme measures to keep it a secret. I've yet to hear a single valid argument as to WHY the government would think we're not ready or what advantage it would be to keep it a secret. Any conspiracy theorists care to shed some light on this particular theory?
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. :(
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.)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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.
Just an FYI to all the /.'ers, the group formerly known as NIMA has changed its name to the National Geospacial Agency, or NGA.
-1: flamebait should really be -1: inciteful
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.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
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.
"Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy
This 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).
"The slave who knows his master's will and does not get ready...will be be beaten with many blows."Luke 12:47-48
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.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
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
are these the same guys that told Bush Iraq still had WMD's? Or are they the ones that track Santa Claus on Christmas Eve?
[sarcasm off]
Ok, please everyone who read the NASA report about the failure of MPL please raise your hands...
(Yeah, I RTFR)
1 - They TRIED to use the Mars Relay (the UHF stuff)
2 - Do you think Mr Top_guy-boss-of-it-all has a special receiver in his desk to cature data directly from the spacecraft? Sorry, everything is gathered from the Deep Space Network: 3 stations: one in US, one in Spain and one in Australia...
They all tried to get the signal (even detect the UHF signal from earth...)
how long until
How far are the rovers going to be?
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.