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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:
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~ |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:
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Photo: .
Enlarged: o
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
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.
This might help.
These aren't the sigs you're looking for.
Is this what you are referring to?
We Build Beautiful Websites
If only they had a sensor that measured constant force exterted on a landing leg insted of the short impulse of landing.
I'm willing to bet the team wanted to disrupt the surrounding area around the craft as little as poissible. If you wait for a an extended force, that's time that the craft is on the group firing it's rockets into the ground doing nothing but churning up the landscape.
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.
There's no standard design because we're still looking for the best solution! We've only landed a handful of times. Don't forget it's not just the landing to consider, but how we get the thing there. The systems used for the Rovers did pretty well for themselves, and I bet we see more of the Bouncy-Ball design in the future. However, landing location has a lot to do with landing type. The ice caps might in general have too delicate of a surface to ensure the bouncy-ball design work well there.
I'm sure that with continued missions, a more standard solution will come into effect.
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]
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...
From msss.com (where some images of the "wreck" can be seen):
"Shortly after the loss of Mars Polar Lander (MPL), the Mars Global Surveyor MOC was employed to acquire dozens of 1.5 m/pixel images of the landing uncertainty ellipses, looking for any evidence of the lander and its fate..."
These are not new images, just new finds on old images.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.