THE Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity may soon have another feather to add to their collective cap. Images of their landing sites are helping NASA scientists confirm the whereabouts of the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander, which crashed on the Red Planet in December 1999.
Investigators suspected that the MPL shut down its reverse thrusters too soon, causing it to plummet the final 40 metres to the Martian surface. After the accident, the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor looked for a site that may have been darkened by an engine blast, with a bright parachute within a kilometre of that site. In 2000, the MOC team found one such site, but the resolution of the images was not high enough to be conclusive.
Since then, the MOC team has found the twin rovers and their parachutes with the same technique. 鈥淲hen we saw the Mars rovers鈥� landing sites in our images, we recognised there were things in common with what we had observed at the candidate MPL site,鈥� says Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, which operates the MOC. In the next few months, the team will re-examine the possible crash site with higher-resolution imaging.
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