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Mars Polar Lander Lost Again
IZ Reloaded writes "The Mars Global Surveyor during one of its latest scans of the area where the Mars Polar Lander was originally spotted, discovers that the spacecraft is no longer there! Space.com reports, "We conclude that our interpretation of these features was in error. This is not the location of the Mars Polar Lander. Because the landing uncertainty ellipse is so much larger than our images, and we do not have another candidate to which to target...we cannot continue to hunt for the lander," the MSSS site explains."
Well, I'm sure we'll do better when we send human explorers to the planet.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
You can make a rough guess of their capabilities based on HUBBLE imagery, and add some factors for super-secret NSA abilities on top of that.
Last time I was bored, I took a look at some raw Hubble images of Pluto, calculated the distance between Hubble and Earth on the day the picture was supposedly taken, and worked out the angle of view for 1 pixel of uninterpolated data from Hubble. Taking that angle down from Hubble's orbit height to Earth resulted in resolution just slightly better than 1" per pixel.
The NSA supposedly has at LEAST Hubble resolution, if not remarkably better.
(conspiracy theories, here we come...)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.