Looking at the images of the Spirit/Opportunity landing site, it seems many of the features such as tracks and rocket blast markings have faded considerably often to the point of being invisible in the nearly three years since landing.

This had me thinking about the MGS images taken in the hope of finding MPL. Initially it was reported that MGS had spotted the lander, one image had a white spot/streak interpreted as the parachute and a dark patch with a spot in the centre not too far off, taken to be the blast zone of the rockets with the lander in the centre.

However another image taken 5 years later seemed to discount this theory - the features had faded or changed significantly. BUT, seeing how much the rover sites have changed in an even shorter time, wouldn't the same happen to the MPL site in 5 years - perhaps to an even greater degree with the more extreme seasonal changes at that location. Also, the latest HiRISE images show just how difficult it has been to spot the landers on the surface with MGS, the Viking sites in particular.

I hope HiRISE takes another look at this spot.

Mars Polar Lander NOT Found, MSSS article:
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/10/17/

Digging up this thread. The Sun has returned to the south pole so maybe it's time to search for the Mars Polar Lander.

I wonder how climate changes described in an article yesterday have affected the hardware of MPL.

I think it's a good idea to collect links to HiRISE images that cross the MPL landing ellipse. For starters, here are the MOC pages that describe the search and show the search region:
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/12_99_...arch/index.html
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/1_24_0...nder/index.html
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/oct_20...site/index.html

These images unfortunately do not include any latitude/longitude information. However, here's a page from the MOLA team that does, suggesting that a useful box to consider is 75 to 77 south and 164 to 166 east.
http://ssed.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mpl.html

--Emily

So far, it looks like there are at least 3 images inside that box:

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_002846_1040 color bands available (and a little whoops in the label..."Possible Phoenix Lander Landing Site"?)
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_003690_1035 red filter
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_004336_1035 red filter, heavily clouded over

I am wondering if the MPL (Mars Polar Lander) did not crash but sank into the the ice. I read as one of the possible causes was that the landing sensor thought it landed.
Just my small thought.

Help them find Mars Polar Lander!

article written by Mr. Phil Plait : http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/05...s-polar-lander/

and the publication on HiRISE website: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/HiBlog/?p=134

Regards,

Svetlio

I do find it odd that absolutely no trace of Mars Polar Lander has been spotted within HiRISE images so far. If the failure scenario proposed by the investigation team is correct, the parachute deployed successfully, the heatshield was jettisoned and the lander separated from the backshell. All of those components are VERY striking in images of the MER landing sites, in fact you can see them without having to view the images at a "one to one" scale, you certainly didn't need to search for them.

How would several Martian polar winters have affected those components visibility, would they "weather " differently to those at lower latitudes such as Spirit and Opportunity, is that the reason they haven't been spotted I wonder? I suppose it's also possible that something else went wrong during EDL - the parachute failed to deploy for example.

Yesss... but we knew where those sites were! The descent images brought us very close, and the surface images clinched it. Here, we have no clue where to look across those vast images. Well, a clue, the target ellipses. But there's a lot of territory to search.

Phil

Has the entire landing ellipse even been covered by HiRise? If the image on the blog linked to above is anything to go by, about 2/3 of the landing ellipse is covered to this date. It's possible they looked at the "wrong" places to find it or it's possible it's there, but lost in some of that terrain - from what I've seen it's not exactly featureless in that MPL would jump out right at you.

It's parachute would.

Yes... but the point I was trying to make is that it wouldnt have taken long, "seconds" probably to identify the various components in the MER landing site images, even without images from the rovers on the ground. The parachutes are visible when the images are viewed at 25% scale, at 100% you can see the folds in them!!! It seems like we will need to search the MPL site at the single pixel scale.

Spirit's parachute and Backshell are shown below at various scales.

Also, if you are unable to view the big jp2 images, you may start a quick search using the grayscale .jpg images. Rover tracks are visible, so you may be even able to spot the rocket blast zone of MPL.

It's only easy if you know what you're looking for, and where to look. We know nothing about the state of the vehicle - I'm not sure we even know if the DS2 probes were deployed, though I might be wrong about that, not having looked it up. And we don't know where to look.

But put that aside... can anybody identify in HiRISE the feature initially interpreted as MPL in MOC images? I've only glanced, but not found it yet.

Phil

But if the failure scenario favoured by the investigation team is correct, the lander probably made it to the surface in one piece with the rest of the EDL hardware in the surrounding area.

That's true! But we don't know that's what happened, and one explanation for the difficulty in finding it would be...

Phil

Sigh, I think looking for this thing is an exercise in futility AND a recipe to get mad. The amount of topography and albedo differences in some images is crazy, looking for a tiny object down there is madness. I just gave one single image almost a full going-over and I swear I'm starting to see things. Tell me I'm nuts, these things in the image below can't be the parachute and the lander. I know the "lander" is just too big to be real, but you've gotta admit it looks out of place there and almost even shows blast marks underneath! In reality I'd expect MPL to appear the same pixel size as in the half-res context above, not twice that.

I dunno.

But I think you might have the perfect image for the worlds most evil jigsaw puzzle.

I like C!

I dunno, man, just don't know. They look more compelling to me than other purported finds...in fact, the "lander" almost looks like it made a successful descent. That topography is just a mess, though, and definitely promotes the Rorschach Effect.

We might need to send a cam with 1 cm resolution to find the damn thing in this stuff. Guess there's still a possibility we might get super-lucky and catch a specular reflection if there's some reasonably bare metal exposed & the geometry happens to be right.

Neglecting the feasibility of actually acquiring that dataset, can you imagine what an effort it would be to inspect the entire landing ellipse at 1cm resolution? We're talking about a 600 times larger pixel area than even this (already huge) amount. That would undoubtedly require a computer pattern recognition algorithm, no human would venture into sifting through that systematically. All the more because we don't even know what we're looking for - deployed chutes, broken heat shields or just a single crater. It's not that easy to tell a computer "find everything out of the ordinary!" either.

I wonder what effects to metal surfaces (or parachute) a 9 year exposure to this environment would produce. Are we even sure this sublimation and frosting process didn't already bury all hardware or at least coat it with a thin layer of dust and rendered it part of that environment? Additionally, how does albedo in this region compare to equatorial sites, are we expecting metal surfaces and the parachute to jump out or is the terrain here much brighter (apart from certain very dark areas)?

So many unknowns...

I am choosing to ignore this thread until Phoenix is safely on the ground

Hi folks!


I don't know if it's been said elsewhere, but the easiest way to display these huge jpeg2000 files is to download a copy of ExpressView from Lizardtech.com.

I've been using that for searching for hardware, even though I have Photoshop CS3 with the jpeg2000 plugin installed, as Expressview is a lot faster at opening the files.

In my own search of the MPL site (and other lander hardware) images, I found it takes me about 4 hours to search each HiRISE image.

I have a "candidate" possibility for MPL, but there are problems with that set of objects being the lander, not the least of which is that nothing stands out in the MOC images of that same area taken within weeks of the loss of MPL. Sadly, it's dark there now, and it will be several months before any search imaging can resume.

I'll tell you where this object is, but it might be more fun to see if someone else notices it - sort of a qualitative eyeball calibration exercise, in effect!

-Tim.

I found a candidate site for the lander. Currently, I'm downloading the source JP2 file so that I can get a much better look; but the feature is totally out of place. It could still be part of a cave entrance of some sort, so I need a much better look. It appears to be about the correct size and has maybe created a very small crater.

I'm excited...it is by far the most promising feature I've seen after review about half of all the HRISE images in this area. Not all of the terrain is as bad as some suggest.

Well, can you at least point out THE image ?

Oups, I notice, while typing tha Marsisimportant has one too! I hope it's the same image! Can you share the image and see what we'll see?

Just to be clear, is your "candidate" the lander, an impact site, or the parachute? I'm preparing a Web page with info for the search and I was going to tell people that the parachute/backshell was the best object to be searching for, with examples of what they look like at the successful landing sites -- should I also try to give examples of what the lander/crash site should look like? If so I'll need some help from image magicians here to come up with sample images.

--Emily

Indeed, I seem to have picked out the worst image to start. About the only thing interesting in that whole image I could see is this funny-looking rock:
Click to view attachment
Almost looks like a black bathtub, pretty out of place for that whole region. I hope others are having more luck.

I finally have a real close-up view of my feature. It is strange. I'm not so sure it is the lander, unless the parachute landed on top of it and is completely draped over it.

Here is a view.

Click to view attachment

There is nothing like this anywhere near. Most other features nearby are dark colored sand dunes.

Remember, the MPL lander dropped away from the backshell and chute before landing. It would have to be a quite exceptional coincidence for either, the parachute to land right on top of the lander, or, the landing process to work fine until the lander was due to separate and then fail. Also, the parachute should be much much brighter than that. Even pathfinders 10+ year old parachute is whiter than white to HiRISE
Doug

Someone over at the Bad Astronomy site has shown that same area, which image is that? I haven't ran across a feature like that. It looks like a hill to me, do you know what direction the illumination is from?

Doug, if only we could be 100% positive there was a chute deployed. For all we know, the lander could have blown up the minute after last contact prior to entry and we'd still only have the most likely cause to assume (40 meter high crash).

Oh - I agree with that point, we don't know if the parachute deployed. However, if it did, it's going to be very big, very bright and very obvious indeed. You would find it easily with HiRISE. There wont be an 'is that the parachute' sort of moment - it'll be 'that IS the parachute'. I was saying, in response to 'unless the parachute landed on top of it' that there's no way the parachute would be a not-obvious object.

If the situation arises when we've got the full ellipse in HiRISE and there's no Parachute and backshell, then the failure mode has to be backed up to between cruise stage sep, and chute deployment. i.e. the entry process.

Doug

Some areas of the landing site look VERY dangerous, I suppose it's possible MPL failed at touchdown after a successful Entry and Descent.

I found this on my own. The suggestion of 'bad astronomy' was not a very nice comment.

This is an image from HRISE and closer to the center of the landing ellipse. I believe Mars time is about 2:30 PM.

It looks like a possible parachute. I thought of a hill but the folds suggest otherwise. I may have found the parachute draped over a rock of some sort. Regardless, the feature is very strange and does not appear to be natural in origin, especially given the surrounding terrain.

I've just noticed some other nearby targets--just a little further away (they don't look like this, but who knows what I will find). I'm going to get a closer look at them. They are much smaller in size.

Meanwhile I have other things to do. I will get back with you later.

MPL searchers beware: Potential spoilers to follow!


The image my gizmoid is in is PSP_005536_1030. The objects look similar to a "lander" and "backshell", but they're too big. The putative backshell object is about 5 meters across, whereas the actual backshell is just over half that size. So, if it's real hardware, it's sitting on a rise that's similar in brightness and shape, so that it resembles a single conical object 5 meters across at the base - not impossible, but reducing the chances (and definitely the certainty) that it's hardware. The putative lander object does not match the shading I get when I illuminate a lander model with the same lighting geometry as the HiRISE image, though I initially thought it did, when I compared it to a simulated image produced by MSSS during the search with MOC. Still, not impossible for it to be a lander, particularly if it's tilted or oriented or mangled in a manner that's hard to anticipate. But the poor match to the model does reduce the possibility that it's hardware and not a natural object.

When I first saw these objects last fall, I got pretty excited by their apparent similarities to other lander hardware we've seen in HiRISE images and the fact that they're within a few kilometers of the center of the Nav ellipse. But in addition to the scales and lighting issues, there is no bright patch near the putative backshell that might be a parachute. So, I wondered if it might be dust mantled after all this time. And so I've searched corresponding MOC image coverage (specifically M1104140, taken less than 2 months after the loss of MPL), and there aren't any anomalously bright OR dark spots at the locations of these features. The color coverage by HiRISE does run over these features but, unlike the other hardware we've seen in color, neither of these objects appears blue-tinted in color - they match the surrounding surface color.

So, if this is the lander, it was more or less "successful" at reaching the surface intact, it's oriented wrong by about 45 degrees or so, possibly tilted, and it was mantled so as to not stand out from its surroundings rather quickly after the landing... ...in other words, it's not bloody likely to be the lander.

Early on in my search, I identified a dark spot in a CTX image to the south (and thus downrange) of the center of the nav ellipse, and a few hundred meters beyond the HiRISE coverage. It'll be interesting to see this spot in HiRISE come spring, in the off chance it's an impact site. There is no MOC coverage of this feature (at least not of sufficient resolution, IIRC), as it was just outside the search area for MPL. But except that this is an isolated dark spot in that image (beyond a field of dark splotches in that area), there's nothing particularly remarkable about it, and it might just be a site of defrosting or a dark dust streak, and thus a natural feature.

-Tim.

There's nothing wrong with Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy site. I didn't allude you stole that image, I just wanted to say I saw that feature posted earlier and wanted to know which image it apears in. I didn't come across it in the several images I looked at and it does look hard to miss. Without knowing context, that still looks to me like topography

That's a conical pit. There is another one in the region. I remember wondering whether this might be the lander, sunk into the ice. But it's a pretty big hole. I think I measured it around 50 meters across. I think other similar pits can be found elsewhere in this terrain, though I don't think there were any near this one.

-Tim.

Anybody else suddenly having problems with the HiRISE website?

--Emily

Here context for the feature I showed.

Click to view attachment

(I had another image in mind but it is too large of a file.)



There is a lot of dust in the area. A bright parachute would be mostly covered in that dust.

The source file is PSP_005114_1035_RED.NOMAP.JP2

The feature cannot be a conical pit because the lighting is all wrong for that at this time of day. At 2:30, the sun light is coming from the top left corner of the image. A hill is more believable; but the radiating folds suggest something more complex. The hills in the area are relatively smooth with dark sand dunes on top.

It stopped working for me about half an hour ago. What's worse is IASViewer won't even start up due to this...

Acually, the sunlight is from the lower right. The sample you show is of one of the "spider" features first identified by MOC. These are sinuous radial troughs that are deeper near the center of the "spiders" and shallowing outward where they branch and disappear. In stereo, these are similar to dilation cracks in frost heave structres in the arctic, "pingos". But pingos typially have much lower base:height ratios than the "spiders" do.

-Tim.

Yay, the website seems to be back up.

--Emily

Sorry, but the illumination is not from lower right. It is from the upper left. That I am absolutely sure of.

Check the label.


North azimuth is listed as 95° for the NOMAP version of that image. The north azimuth is measured clockwise from the right side of the frame (0°). Subsolar azimuth is listed as 50.6°, so sun illumination is from the bottom right of the scene.

Again, the feature you show in the cropped area is a depression, not a high.

-Tim.

MarsIsImportant, I was also completely confused about what the north azimuth meant for HiRISE images until I had a conversation with some of the HiRISE folks. As Tim says, the north azimuth for the non-map-projected images (which are the ones I would recommend for performing these searches, as they represent non-resampled data) are measured clockwise from the right side of the frame (which I find counterintuitive enough; it gets worse). For map-projected images, it's the same, as long as you're dealing with an image that is not close to one of the poles. Polar images are in a polar stereographic projection, in which lines of latitude make concentric circles around the pole, and lines of longitude are straight, intersecting at the pole. So in the map-projected images of places close to the pole, north is not necessarily up. Which direction north is depends upon what longitude you're looking at. If you're looking at a place near longitude 0, north will be up. However, the Mars Polar Lander landing site is at 165, which is to say very close to longitude 180, so the map-projected images have north almost straight down. For the one you are looking at, PSP_005114_1035, the direction to north is given as 75 degrees, which (when you measure it clockwise from the right side of the frame) gives you a north direction that is only 15 degrees to the right of straight down.

I think Tim Parker would be the first to admit that he is not always right. But I think that if Tim says he's sure about something, you should consider it to be pretty likely that he's right.

--Emily

Hi friends (and Hi Tim ... we have to stop meeting like this),

My thoughts are:

1) We really do not know what caused MPL to disappear. While the MPL failure review board identified the "most probable cause" as a premature shutdown of the descent engines at about 40 m above the ground due to a software bug, that bug was only one of several possible failure modes that were identified then and since. We can not make too many assumptions as to what the lander looks like. (But I do think it is there somewhere.)

2) Unless Mars itself camouflages the vehicle (e.g. by overlaying layers of dust in the annual CO2 ice deposit, or the lander has fallen into one of the larger "spiders"), I think we should see something. The lander's design (including heat shield and backshell) used a lot of highly reflective MLI (multi-layer insulation) blanketing in many key places. I suspect that regardless of how it landed, there should be pieces of highly reflective material that are exposed and would result in one or more "hot pixels". Check out the image of the airbag cover from 1997 Mars Pathfinder's landing on slide 6 or 7 as well as the Mars Pathfinder heat shield debris here http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/HiBlog/wp-co...HiRISE_talk.pdf.

Note how bright that 1 meter round piece of airbag cover MLI is. We saw it in the distance in 1997 but it was only after we got the view from HiRISE that we realized that it was airbag cover debris.

3) We have not yet covered the landing ellipse with HiRISE images. I think we have covered more than 50% but there is still room to believe that MPL landed outside the areas imaged so far. The HiRISE/MRO team stopped imaging the MPL area once the southern summer sun set. As Tim suggests, the lander could be a km from one of the edges of any of these images.

I am betting on next year! While our eyes are sore (especially Tim's) and our image processing software did not yield anything, we could be wrong ... these images cover a lot of territory. Please let the HiRISE gang know if you find something! Our inquiring minds want to know!

Take care!

-Rob Manning

***************
These comments are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of JPL, Caltech nor NASA.

Emily,

The azimuth on the label Tim pointed out for the non-map image that I posted is 95 degrees. It points north relative to the map. That is basically a right angle that points North. That clearly points to the right of the image. West is toward the top of the image. East is on the bottom of the image. The South Pole is toward the left of the image as you face it.

I am correct. I have no doubt.

I've been taking a look around that same JP2 image. Many spiders appear to be depressions and cracks. Others are dunes.

Also the lighting appears to change in different parts of the image. Perhaps this is because it is so close to the South Pole. Perhaps the azimuth is only good for the center of the image. Or the label is wrong, which would have led me astray in my conclusions. Some parts of the image appear to be lighted from the bottom right. Or it maybe just too late at night and my eyes are playing tricks.

Something is not right with this image projection. So with that in mind, I will consider it possible I don't have everything completely accurate.

I need to get some sleep. Tomorrow I will look some more. So if I am wrong, then I apologize to Tim now instead of later. The truth is what we are after. It's not a popularity contest.

I've tidied this thread up a little - MIP, please be more careful before jumping to a conclusion so contrary to the collective wisdom, and then stating quite so forcefully.

The killer point is that if stereo imagery describes the feature as a depression, then the label is irrelevant - illumination is from the lower right. As another post ( which made no sense during clear up, so was culled ) - you must be carefull assuming that MRO is heading south, and the East is to the right. This could be an ascending observation where the geometry would be inverted.

Doug

Hi Rob,
Looking forward to Phoenix landing, I'm wondering if the behaviour of the atmosphere at high latitude is harder to modelize or less "well known" (lack of experience) so this could give us some hope to still find MPL away from the center of the elipse?

MIP: "Something is not right with this image projection"

Most HiRISE images are given in a cylindrical projection, north straight up. but near-polar images like these are in polar stereographic, and north is in a different place. All the information you need is in the table with each image.

Phil

Furthermore, if the dataset in question is non-map projected (NOMAP), there is no projection involved. As others have said, depending on whether the observation took place on the ascending or descending node, the illumination for these products would generally seem to come from diametrically opposite directions. If you feel the illumination suddenly "changes direction" across a single swath, that's just your brain being tricked by reverse topography (e.g. hills turning into depressions).