Crowdsourced Effort May Have Found Soviet Mars Mission's Remains

A story at Slashgear says that the remains of a Soviet mission to Mars may have been spotted — on Mars — by enthusiasts poring over old photos taken by a NASA orbiter. The article points out that the find must be confirmed by further imaging, but matches the seekers' expectations. From the article: "The community at VK.com/Curiosity_Live crowdsourced a mission to find the Soviet Union’s long-lost Mars 3 spacecraft, with the site’s leader, Vitali Egorov of St. Petersburg, Russia, creating models of what hardware from the spacecraft should look like. With this reference, the community combed through a large image taken five years ago by NASA’s MRO, identifying what is believed to be the craft’s parachute, lander, terminal retrorocket, and heat shield."

Comments

Re:Stranfe quote FTA:

[lxs]

Turns out the number of 1.8 billion is stated correctly in the original press release.

Mars 3

[nvn]

Here is full story with nice pictures (google translate from russian) http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=ru&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://habrahabr.ru/post/175827/

Mars 3 = First Soft Lander on Mars

[thrich81]

This shouldn't be news to anyone, but Mars 3 wasn't just any old mission. It was the first soft lander on Mars. Transmitted data for about 14-15 seconds, then ceased for unknown reasons.