I've never heard that about the thermite Pat, do you have any handy
source on that? That's kind of a typical wild Soviet technology for a
mission of this type when you think about it! I would agree that it
would be a small target even with petals extended, but there also
remains two other issues. Dust and location. Martian dust is
ubiquitous as you know but would it cover a spacecraft in all this
time? (what has it been 20 years?) It would be and additonal facet in
our understanding of martian surface dynamics and dust movement it we
could find, for instance, partially covered. But alas, where are the
Soviet spheres? Was technology back then sophisticated enough to plot
actual location? Finally I think there were three Soviet landers that
impacted the planet, is that accurate?............................Doce


On Nov 29, 2:45 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
wrote:
Whats really neat is that the site states they will be soon imaging
other "hardware" landing spots, including Viking Pathfinder, MPL. Of
course I'll throw a vote in for the Soviet landing sights as well (how
would one find out where they landed?),,,,,,this is going to be very
interesting...................DocThe problem with the Soviet launders is that they were basically spheres
that deployed four petals, so it might be hard to tell them from rocks.
The heatshield might show up, but it's going to take a lot of photo
analysis and luck to spot one.
The other problem is that they were designed to self-destruct after
they'd landed and taken their photos by use of a thermite charge to
avoid contaminating the Martian environment, so what may be down there
now are piles of fuzed slag, not spacecraft.

Pat