Slashdot Mirror
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."
Turns out the number of 1.8 billion is stated correctly in the original press release.
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/
Technically this is true. When an object lands on Mars, Mars lands on the object. They both have gravitational fields which attract one another.
Whether this means that Earth has also gone Soviet is up to debate.
It adds a whole new meaning to "The RED planet."
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.