PHOTOGRAPHIC surveillance experts working for the US military believe they
have found NASA鈥檚 Mars Polar Lander, which was supposed to have crashed onto
Mars more than a year ago. Rumours have been circulating that the spacecraft is
standing intact on its landing legs, raising new questions about why it
failed.
The lander arrived near the Martian south pole in December 1999. But mission
controllers lost contact with it during its descent. An enquiry concluded that
as the spacecraft made its final descent towards the surface a software error
switched off its thrusters too early, sending the lander plummeting to the
ground.
After the disaster, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, a military
organisation that extracts information from surveillance photos, offered to
search images of the crash site from the Mars Global Surveyor. 鈥淭hey were given
40 images and they鈥檝e studied all of them,鈥� says NIMA spokeswoman Jennifer
Lafley.
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Last week, NIMA announced that it believes it has found the lander. According
to some news reports, the agency has suggested it might be upright. If so, NASA
will have to think again about why it lost contact with the spacecraft. NIMA
would not provide 快猫短视频 with its full report and the analysts who
studied the images were not available to comment. NIMA is currently reviewing
the results with NASA.
Ed Weiler, NASA鈥檚 space science chief, is unconvinced. He says NIMA based its
view on a single MGS image. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 say it鈥檚 conclusive until you see it in
images two, three, four and five.鈥� And the picture of the dead lander reportedly
covers just two or three pixels of the million-pixel image. 鈥淭o really
understand what happened to MPL, you would need a resolution about 10 times
better than we have now.鈥�