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."

Comments

sigh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn martian tow-away zones.

Re:sigh...

[sdpuppy]

No, they actually found the Polar Lander 1/4 mile away with wheels and engine gone.

That's what happens when you park your Polar Lander in the wrong neighborhood! :-)

Re:sigh...

[timothykaine]

Damn martian tow-away zones.

But officer, *all* the curbs on this planet are red!

REAL Polar Landers..

[rylin]

REAL Polar Landers don't ask for directions.

"spacecraft is no longer there"?

[Bad Ad]

how can it "not longer be there"? this just shows it was never there in the first place...

"(score:5, trying to intice comments about martians"

Oh Great! Not again.

[bjason82]

Proof again that when left to the responsibility of the government, they do things best. Then again, the martians could have taken it! Someday those little green bastards are going to get a knuckle sandwich.

Re:Oh Great! Not again.

[david.given]

If it weren't for gummint interference we'd have intergalactic travel and be driving around in cars made of Osnomean Arenak.

Given the kind of crumple zones you'd get in a car made of arenak --- i.e. none at all --- I think I'll stick with plain steel, thanks. I don't like having all the kinetic energy of half a tonne of car travelling at 70 mph transferred to my torso via my seat belt!

Of course, if you could fit the car with Bergenholms, that'd be a different matter, although I suspect that the kind of pinball game rush-hour traffic would become would be even more stressful than it currently is. At least when you're in a traffic jam you don't run the risk of ricocheting off some pensioner's pet gerbil and arriving on Mars.

Re:Oh Great! Not again.

[Winkhorst]

There seems to be an element here of the old "Heaven is perfect and immutable" belief system popularized by those ever so happy-go-lucky inhabitants of the Vatican over a couple of thousand years. Every time something changes, especially on Mars, the earlier observations are assumed to have been in error and the present conditions are assumed to be permanent and never changing. This goes back to the original observations of "canali" on Mars and includes the "proof" that the Martian face really wasn't there because it is no longer there. Now a spacecraft has been found; but NO, it couldn't have been found; because it's NOT THERE NOW! The parachute couldn't have blown away? The dust couldn't have covered the crash site? NO! IMPOSSIBLE! Why? Because it's not there now.... Perfect and immutable, just like the religious authorities have been telling us all along.

Isn't this the point...?

[Jeff_at_RAD]

in the movie where you cue the scary music?

dust, frost?

[Use Psychology]

perhaps the lander could have been covered by dust, or c02 frost -- therefore eliminating the weak detection seen before?

V'ger

[eno7]

Maybe it will return one day as P'Lander to search for the makers.

Race you!

[Frantactical Fruke]

Let me be the first to say:

Good job with the brooms, Martian dudes!
Hope you enjoy the hardware.
Sorry we forgot to pack any porn on the hard disk.

Re:Race you!

[Kjella]

Sorry we forgot to pack any porn on the hard disk.

Since it'd be roughly as exciting as seeing two dogs mating to them, I think that might be just as well...

Misleading summary..

[Vellmont]

the spacecraft is no longer there!

I think what the poster meant is the spacecraft was never there to begin with. With limited resolution and enough random dark spots and hills there's bound to be a few that look like they might be a parachute and a lander.

Given how poor the images are I wonder why they ever thought this was the polar lander at all and not just natural features of mars?

Re:Misleading summary..

[larkost]

Two notes:

To the best of my knowledge the best spy satellites have a resolution of about 4 inches. That is good enough to recognize that there is a license plate there, but not read it. I realize that hollywood regularly presents satellites as being capable of so much more, but that is hollywood.

Getting a spy satellite into Earth orbit vs. getting the same hardware into orbit around Mars. And then add in the face that the satellite around mars has to do many jobs, and carry a really big antenna to phone home. All of a sudden it becomes clear why the spy satellite might have better resolution.

Re:Misleading summary..

[GooberToo]

Last I heard, ~4" resolution was available during the mid-80's. More current information on available resolutions is top secret and not available to the public.

Chances are, resolutions available from modern spy sats provide better than 4" resolution...especially when you consider the improvements available in active optics (active mirrors, etc), radar, and IR technologies.

Re:Misleading summary..

[MadCow42]

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.

Re:Misleading summary..

[alanh]

Do a search on the Rayleigh criterion as it pertains to optical telescopes. Take, for example, the 200" (5.8 m) telescope on Mount Palomar. Under optimal conditions, it has a resolution of about 0.2 arcseconds. Put it up in LEO at, say 200 miles, and that would be an equivalent of about 1.6 inches on the ground. The HST with it's 2.4 m mirror would be about 3 inches.

Unless they're doing some fancy stuff with multiple satellites, the HST's resolution is about the limit of what you can expect with optical telescopes.

Re:Misleading summary..

[GooberToo]

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.

That's very, very, very, very, very, very doubtful that you can draw any such conclusion from the performance of Hubble. Hubble is designed to look VERY far away. In fact, Hubble has problems if it tries to focus on an object too near (the earth for example).

On top of that, Hubble is veyr much a modern telescope, simply put into orbit. It as very little in common with anything currently used as a spy telescope. Hubble is designed SPECIFICALLY to operate without an atmosphere. Spy sats are designed SPECIFICALLY to deal with atmospheric effects. Basically, Hubble and a spy telescopes have nothing but superficial commonalities.

Your assertion makes about as much sense as saying something like, "You can make a rough guess at what an orange tastes like by eating an apple." What? Sure, they are both fruits, but commonalities stop there.

Bloody mind tricks!

[Jugalator]

We conclude that our interpretation of these features was in error.

But you put forth some pretty darn convincing evidence! I recall an earlier Slashdot story that covered all this in detail, where you announc...

This is not the location of the Mars Polar Lander.

...

That was not the location of the Mars Polar Lander.

Move along, move along!

List of Mars Efforts

[EuropeanGuy]

List of Mars Efforts, courtesy of Wikipedia

Items with bullets represent full or partial failures.

* 1960 -- Marsnik 1
* 1960 -- Marsnik 2
* 1962 -- Sputnik 29
* 1962 -- Mars 1
* 1962 -- Sputnik 31
* 1964 -- Mariner 3
1964 -- Mariner 4
* 1964 -- Zond 2
* 1965 -- Zond 3
1969 -- Mariner 6
1969 -- Mariner 7
* 1969 -- Mars 1969A
* 1969 -- Mars 1969B
* 1971 -- Mariner 8
* 1971 -- Cosmos 419
* 1971 -- Mars 2
1971 -- Mars 3
1971 -- Mariner 9
* 1973 -- Mars 4
* 1973 -- Mars 5
* 1973 -- Mars 6
* 1973 -- Mars 7
1975 -- Viking 1
1975 -- Viking 2
* 1988 -- Phobos 1
* 1988 -- Phobos 2
* 1992 -- Mars Observer
1996 -- Mars Global Surveyor
* 1996 -- Mars 96
1996 -- Mars Pathfinder
* 1998 -- Nozomi (Planet-B)
* 1998 -- Mars Climate Orbiter
* 1998 -- Mars Polar Lander
* 1998 -- Deep Space 2 (part of Mars Polar Lander spacecraft)
2001 -- Mars Odyssey
2003 -- Mars Exploration Rovers
* 2003 -- Mars Express

Re:List of Mars Efforts

[thermopile]

There's a much better and much funnier synopsis of Mars attempts and failures here, as well as a record of a few other planets.

Overall, we're really only about 33% successful at it. Space Travel is Not Easy.

Re:List of Mars Efforts

[Bob3141592]

Well, I'm sure we'll do better when we send human explorers to the planet.

Re:they should put a leash on that thing!

[Nerull]

The problem is the atmosphere. Even on earth plotting a trajectory through air can be rather inaccurate. Everything from pockets of turbulance, to what direction and how hard the wind was blowing that day can drasticly effect the trajectory. It gets even worse if it broke up, or a parachute didn't deploy, or got tangled. This is the reason why they have a landing elipse that is hundreds of miles in diameter.

Hurry!

[werewolf1031]

Click the randomly appearing Mars Polar Lander to win a Free iPod!

Err, wait...

um

[martin-boundary]

Um, maybe I'm missing something, but have they checked for it on Google maps? I lost a black monolith once on the dark side of the moon, but it took all of two seconds to google for it. It was stuck in between some cheese.

little green terr'ists

[hrm]

Which is exactly why GWB is funding Nasa's Mars mission: to take the fight against these little green terrorists to their own planet.

Re:The mods strike again

[FullCircle]

It wasn't me, but some people refuse to mod funny because the poster gets no karma for it.

That's why you get underrated, insightful, interesting, etc on funny posts lately.

OT(moderation notes)

[Mycroft_VIII]

Since modding someone funny gives them no /. karma some have started using interesting or insightfull in it's place to better reward humor and this might explain the mod.
    Also whenever I meta mod and find I need to check the 'context' MOST of the time I'm MM-ing a post several weeks old, only once or twice has the article been still open for posting.
    That last bit said I still rarely see meta mods on my moderation anymore, though at one time I could expect to see about 20% of my mods meta'd, and within a month or two.

Mycroft

Re:Area 51 on Mars too?

[ken kenobi]

Extra-marital life?

They're hiding evidence of their affairs with space probes fom their spouses??