Mars Crater Theory Tries To Explain Missing Beagle

JayBonci writes "CNN is running a piece regarding the failure of the Beagle Mars probe being possibly attributed to a crater landing. It's an interesting story about the variety of forensics being used to try and pick up on the lost craft."

Comments

Re:Interesting...

[BlewScreen]

Interesting indeed...

From this article:

[The crater] was only revealed by close-up pictures of the site taken by another NASA orbiter, Mars Global Surveyor, minutes after the British probe was supposed to have landed last Thursday.

"minutes after" ????

here's a mapthat shows a couple (from really far away).

Isidis Planitia is at the equator, 1/4 in from the right - there's a big crater under the "a", but you can see others...

and here's a close-up

The gray circular area on the right, in the middle, is the area in question - the crater you can see under the letter "a" in the previous map is the one that's just barely cut off on the right in this one... I think the one they think the probe is in is the one slightly north and about an inch to the west of that one.

I'm not sure when these were taken, but I was looking at them back in the spring, so they've been up for a while, i.e., not since only "minutes after" the probe disappeared...

AND, as you can see, it's very easy to tell that there are craters there - and I'm not even a scientist, nor do I have access to ALL the pix of mars...

-bs