NASA's Mars Polar Lander Found at Last?

Ant wrote in to mention that the Sky and Telescope is running a story (with photographs and other images) that NASA's Mars Polar Lander (MPL) may have been found. From the article: "On December 9, 1999, it was supposed to touch down near the red planet's south pole but disappeared after entering the Martian atmosphere without a trace. 5.5 years later, scientists think they may have finally located the lander's wreckage and confirmed what went wrong with the mission...The search for Mars Polar Lander was hampered by inexperience: the team didn't know what a parachute should look like or how the ground would be disturbed by the landing rockets. Lessons learned from observations of the Mars Exploration Rover landing sites helped team members identify what they think are the parachute, the rocket-blast zone, and ultimately the lander itself."

Comments

Late Breaking News:

[TripMaster Monkey]

Today the Council disclosed the news that the repulsive beings inhabiting the blue planet third from our star have located the wreckage of one of their invading spacecraft near our planet's southern pole.

Strangely enough, their newscasts mentioned nothing of the warning plaque errected alongside the downed invader.
Some scientists theorize that the translation of our warning into their bestial language was imperfect, while others maintain that the plaque is simply too small to be imaged properly with their feeble, childish astronomical instruments.

K'Breel, speaker for the Council, voiced another, more pesimistic theory:

"Certainly, beings who are capable of constructing and sending such fiendishly clever little devices to spy on our world are more than capable of receiving and understanding our warning. They have simply chosen to disregard it. Clearly we can no longer ignore the predaceous advances of the evil blue planet. The Council has given the final authorization to divert our asteroid into a collision course. We now need only wait."

A proposal

[JPelorat]

Change the project name to

Mars Polar Plummeter

and call it a "smashing success"!

Re:A proposal

[vandon]

Who knew parachutes don't work as well in a thin atmosphere?

Here's the photo in case of Slashdotting

[WormholeFiend]

Photo: .

Enlarged: o

Can't Wait

[mattmentecky]

With businesses like http://www.marsshop.com/ selling acre tracts of Martian land, how long before we have someone claiming that the Mars Polar Lander wreckage belongs to them?

We have [usually sunken] treasure laws, accidentally-delivered-merchandise laws but we'll need an inter-planetary-law expert to sort this out, anyone knows a good one?

Obligatory Link to the Lobbing Scorecard

[Old VMS Junkie]

For those of you keeping score in the grand game... http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/index.ht ml

some scientists

[yodaj007]

"the team didn't know what a parachute should look like"

This might help.