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."

Comments

Re:Interesting polar ice cap picture

[cmjensen]

The "interesting image" on the conspiracy theory website at least has the decency to link to the original source at NASA. 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.

Interesting conclusion

[grozzie2]

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.