QUOTE (Decepticon @ Jan 20 2005, 02:09 AM)
I'm looking forward to seeing the other Landers Russian/US
Mars 3 and the Polar Lander are the to main ones I want to see.
That would be great, but... I seem to recall Mike Collins on Apollo 11 looking and looking for Eagle on the surface, and without a precise location the field of view in his sextant was just too narrow to find it.
I know what MRO's resolution is -- but what is the area of an MRO imaging "swath"? How many swaths will have to be imaged to find something that we don't have an exact location for?
The guys at JPL thought they had a good location on Viking 1, but MGS (which can effectively image the smaller MERs) hasn't been able to find it. They have less of a good location fix on Viking 2 and Pathfinder/Sojourner, and also their heroic efforts to find MPL failed. It's going to be hard to find those guys, much less Mars 3, for which I don't know if *anyone* has a decent idea of location.
Of course, we could always get lucky and find one or more of them by chance...
-the other Doug