Astronomy News
Dr. Neal Sumerlin keeps us abreast of happenings in the night sky and the progress of the new Belk Astronomical Observatory.
Blogs we recommend
Other Posts:
Describing the Indescribable (07/22/2009)
Total Solar Eclipse in July (06/07/2009)
Other Earths (05/20/2009)
Save Those Old Computers! (04/13/2009)
Play With Pictures from Mars! (04/13/2009)
Saturn in 2009 (04/13/2009)
The New Worlds (02/04/2009)
Christmas at the Moon (12/10/2008)
Potpourri of Space News (12/10/2008)
Night Sky Happenings (11/17/2008)
Power Sources for Space Probes (11/17/2008)
R.I.P., Mars Phoenix Lander (11/17/2008)
Pictures of Planets (11/17/2008)
Ice Geysers of Enceladus (09/22/2008)
Constellations (09/22/2008)
Happy Equinox Day! (09/22/2008)
More News from Mars (06/04/2008)
We lose a friend (05/03/2008)
Quiz winner! (04/29/2008)
Seeing and Patience (04/22/2008)
The World at Night (03/31/2008)
New Stars that are Really Old (03/14/2008)
Latest From Planetary Spacecraft (03/14/2008)
Lunar Eclipse Update (02/18/2008)
Aiming a Telescope (02/18/2008)
Observatory Update (02/04/2008)
Venus and Jupiter in the Morning (02/04/2008)
Total Lunar Eclipse (02/04/2008)
Messenger Mission to Mercury (02/04/2008)
Search (but no rescue) on Mars
Posted on 05/20/2008I have been searching a satellite image for the crash site of an alien spacecraft.
Don’t worry, I haven’t joined the Roswell/Area 51/X-files sorts. The satellite image is from the HiRISE telescope on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The alien (alien to Mars, anyway) craft is the Mars Polar Lander, which crashed in 1999 in the far southern regions of the planet. The Polar Lander seemed to work perfectly right up until the last seconds of its approach to the surface, when its landing rockets apparently cut off prematurely. It effectively dropped from a great height; even in Mars’ low gravity, that was enough to render the craft inoperable. Radio signals indicate that the parachute deployed, and the signals help us narrow down the area in which the craft should be found. The lander is not a large object, and especially if it crashed into small pieces, even the HiRise camera (which is basically a telescope pointed at the Martian surface) would have a hard time finding it. But the parachute should be big (a good 8 meters or so if stretched out) and bright if it hasn’t been covered with too much dust in the intervening nine years.
The human brain is still superior to computers in the detection of patterns. Volunteers have been solicited http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001428 to scan these images laboriously, looking for evidence of the lander, and I am one of those volunteers. I have blown the full-resolution image (almost a gigabyte!) up to 200%, where the image scale is 12.5 cm per pixel. Think about what that means. A six-foot person lying on the surface would be almost 15 pixels long—easily visible. A 30-foot-long parachute should be even more visible.
But there is a lot of surface to cover. I have spent somewhere between one and two hours scanning the image, and probably have less than 10% of the full image covered. For those of you who think my sanity would be better established if I were indeed a Roswell devotee…well, the thought of what I am actually doing, looking at the surface of Mars to find a human-created artifact…that is sufficient motivation.
Craft sent to Mars do not have a good track record; about half of them have crashed or otherwise met with ill fates. We are about to find out whether our recent lucky streak will continue when the Phoenix Lander http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/ will, we hope, land in the northern polar regions of Mars. If all goes well, the confirmation of the landing will arrive at Earth at 7:53 PM Eastern Daylight time on Sunday evening (May 25). The New York Times has a good article http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/science/space/20mars.html?em&ex=1211428800&en=ab3c8134cf38de86&ei=5087%0A on the basics of the mission.
Lets hope that any images of the Phoenix Lander on the surface of Mars show an intact and functioning craft!