Slashdot Mirror
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."
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:
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Change the project name to
Mars Polar Plummeter
and call it a "smashing success"!
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Here's the text of the article:
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Photo: .
Enlarged: o
Mars Deep Impact.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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?
For those of you keeping score in the grand game... http://www.bio.aps.anl.gov/~dgore/fun/PSL/index.ht ml
Leo Wong: We own entire western hemisphere. That the best hemisphere.
Professor Farnsworth: It's the same way on Earth.
A quick calc shows its more like 5.408219178 years based on a 365 day year and counting today.
This way to the egress...
Does my memory fail me, or wasn't there a news article back then that showed how some defense dep't. spy satellites were trained on Mars and found the thing? It was pretty much where NASA said it would be. And my memory says the pictures we're now seeing (again...) look a LOT like those that the spy cameras saw.
This happened not long after the mishap.
But within a VERY short while, all the news postings and pictures taken by the spy satellites VANISHED from the 'net.
Am I the only one who remembers this?
They found it in a props warehouse at Paramount studios, right next to the Apollo 11 LEM.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
i don't know.
... it's about the only way to live anymore what with the damn taxes.
abandoned at sea, if you recover, it's yours
abandoned on land, on your property, it's yours
abandoned on the side of the road on trash day, it's yours. this how where I get all my lawn equipment. mower, weedwhacker, seed spreader, wheel barrow. other stuff too, radio, tv, computer, coffee pot, couch, lawn chairs, hammock, pots and pans, dishes, building materials,
abandoned on public property? I don't know.around here, abandoned cars and motorbikes are removed by a towing company that has a contract. if no one claims, they get sold for storage. not so easy for the amateur dumpster diver
Here is the direct link to the Malin Space Science Systems page with the data and images.
In addition to MPL, they have found Viking 2.
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/05/05/inCool stuff.
Better Photo: X
(it did crash after all!)
wot no sig
This might help.
These aren't the sigs you're looking for.
Can they can start looking for Beagle 2, so we might have a chance of understanding what went wrong with that one?
If only they had a sensor that measured constant force exterted on a landing leg insted of the short impulse of landing.
Why is there not a standard design mars landing vehicle, one that can be used to deploy any payload upto say 8^3m meters in volume, it would solve a lot of issues and reduce the overall mission costs, if designed well it could be used to land on other bodies (moon/IO/Europa) with only a slight modification to fuel levels/Paracute size/airbag preasure.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
I did read the failure investigation report (can be found here, search for polar) some time ago and IIRC the most probable failure scenario was a software error involving a single boolean:
MPL was to land under active control (with rocket power, not the air-bag trick). To kill the moter once it had touched down the legs contained contact sensors which were constructed of a pin with a spring, a magnet and a Hall-sensor. The legs were to be extended some time before touchdown.
The problem was the sensors would trigger some intermediate false readings during the leg extension. These false readings toggled a flag, which, once the control system first started looking for contact, immediately killed the engine, having the lander free-fall to death. Clearing the flag after the leg-extension would have saved the mission. The bug was not found because of errors in the software design documents and lack of a system level test. The intermediate false readings were found in a component level test, but its consequences somehow didn't made it in the final design.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
The two rovers now in operation are risking issues due to dust covering their solar panels. And we've been reminded over and over how dust and wind have helped shape the surface of Mars for eons, etc.
...is that what we're supposed to believe? How convenient that the raging elements didn't disturb it so NASA wonks could find it later.
But the parachute that has been laying around for the last 5+ years is still in one piece, just as it fell, and is as white as can be...
Somehow when they said they couldn't find it, I was reminded of the desert scene from Spaceballs. I guess they finally switched to a better comb...
unable to resolve function slashdot.sig(), aborting...
I don't think we've been doing this long enough to have enough data to say what the "best" design is on which to base such a "standard" lander. There have only been four or five successful landings on Mars. When that number reaches 20 or 30, perhaps we'll have enough information that your idea will be possible.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Sigh. Had you been paying attention for the last eighteen months, you would know that, one, the rovers are quite close to the equator, albeit on opposite sides of Mars. Mars Polar Lander, right? Sure, compared to the distance between here and there, they're right next to each other, but that doesn't make your idea any less inane.