Mars Global Surveyor photographs Spirit lander

Pat Flannery wrote in news:101e1o227dik937
@corp.supernews.com:


How about Viking 1 and 2 to this degree of image resolution? ...and more
interesting yet, the Soviet Mars landers?

Pat



That would be interesting. I wonder about the Soviet landers though, their
position is probably not very well known since one crash landed and could
not send any data and the other only transmitted for 20 seconds from the
surface.

What I read was that it was doing it's first TV scan when it stopped, it
would be interesting to see what it got (if anything, there was a dust
storm)

Bryan

On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 02:17:58 GMT, (Henry Spencer)
wrote:

Note that it took them two tries to nail Spirit. This particular
spacecraft/camera combination was not designed for precision targeted
imaging. The high-resolution mode of the camera was intended mostly for
semi-random sampling of the surface.

Will Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter be able to do it?

Brian

In article ,
Brian Thorn wrote:
Note that it took them two tries to nail Spirit. This particular
spacecraft/camera combination was not designed for precision targeted
imaging...

Will Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter be able to do it?

My impression is that MRO's design pays more attention to such issues and
should be able to do targeted imaging more easily, although I'm not up on
the details. On MGS, the camera was "low man on the totem pole" to some
extent -- e.g., the orbit is not a good one for optical imaging -- while
MRO's camera is much more central to the mission.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

It will be interesting one day, when someone is strolling across the surface
of Mars and bumps into a Viking, that would be neat to be able to see a
piece of history literally frozen in time.

"fstops" wrote in message
...
Pat Flannery wrote in news:101e1o227dik937
@corp.supernews.com:


How about Viking 1 and 2 to this degree of image resolution? ...and more
interesting yet, the Soviet Mars landers?

Pat



That would be interesting. I wonder about the Soviet landers though, their
position is probably not very well known since one crash landed and could
not send any data and the other only transmitted for 20 seconds from the
surface.

What I read was that it was doing it's first TV scan when it stopped, it
would be interesting to see what it got (if anything, there was a dust
storm)

Bryan

"Christopher" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 19:11:38 +0100, "Ool"
wrote:

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
Rusty B wrote:

Mars Global Surveyor photographs Spirit lander on Martian surface:
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/.../23/index.html

That's _really_ something...thanks for posting that!

I wonder if they can take such a close look at the Beagle 2 landing
(or crash) site. Or is it too big an area to search?

Previous posters have reported that the resolution isn't fine enough
to see Beagle, what happened to it will have to remain a mystery till
we have people in the area, yet another reason to send people to Mars.

I don't believe that. The parachutes are pretty visible from orbit and
they're about the same size as the MER's chutes. The landing ellipse is the
biggest problem as they will have to make hundreds of pictures and comb
them, but that's pretty easily done by some analyzing software (i.e. bright
pixels result in flagging of the picture).

fstops wrote:


What I read was that it was doing it's first TV scan when it stopped, it
would be interesting to see what it got (if anything, there was a dust
storm)


From what I've read it was nothing that could be recognized as Mars-
just either dust-filled air, or static.
If you could have even vaguely have seen anything, the Soviets would
have played up the picture to get bragging rights over Viking 1.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote in
:




From what I've read it was nothing that could be recognized as Mars-
just either dust-filled air, or static.
If you could have even vaguely have seen anything, the Soviets would
have played up the picture to get bragging rights over Viking 1.

Pat



Strange that at least one other Soviet lander stopped after "20
seconds". Didn't this happen to one of the Venera landers too? I wonder
if there wasn't some pressure on the designers to put the best face on
the failure and claim that they had received a little data. Were their
any others? Bryan

In article ,
Hagar wrote:
They tried for Mars Pathfinder and the Viking landers earlier,
without success.

Actually, I think they found Pathfinder and Viking 1 with 1.5m
resolution.

It's possible that my information is out of date. I know they tried early
on, with somewhat disappointing results.

http://www.msss.com/mer_mission/finding_mer/ and
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/1_24_00_pathfinder/
I think they're claiming to be able to see pathfinder in those images.

Mmm... I'd call that borderline. It would be more comforting if it stood
out a bit better, so you could say "yeah, that's Pathfinder all right"
instead of "I suppose that tiny feature at the intersection of the
sightlines must be Pathfinder, and not just another rock".

And the resolution of this new technique (IIRC) is 50 cm.

Only in one direction. But it also gives cleaner images.

They've never located Viking 2, and they really can't find a
lander-sized object on the surface unless they have pictures
taken by that lander to give them some topography to search.

As I noted, we *do* have a tentative location for Viking 2, based on
recent work, but solid it's not.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Henry Spencer wrote:

In article ,
Ool wrote:
Mars Global Surveyor photographs Spirit lander on Martian surface:
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/.../23/index.html

I wonder if they can take such a close look at the Beagle 2 landing
(or crash) site. Or is it too big an area to search?

That's the problem -- Beagle 2 could be anywhere in an area many
kilometers across.


So far everyone is making an assumption that Beagle 2 made it down to the
martian surface intact. It is just as likely that the Beagle 2 failure
resulted in the lander breaking up during entry, and scattering thousands
of bits of scrap all over Isidis Planitia. If that is the case, finding
anything via MGS will be orders of magnitude harder. The only real hope
that I can see at this point is maybe spotting by chance the reflections
from an intact heat shield, backshell, or paracute, if they are large
enough.
-Mike

fstops wrote:

Strange that at least one other Soviet lander stopped after "20
seconds". Didn't this happen to one of the Venera landers too? I wonder
if there wasn't some pressure on the designers to put the best face on
the failure and claim that they had received a little data. Were their
any others? Bryan


I'm trying to remember if I ever saw the surface picture from Mars 4; I
think I may have, but am not sure- anybody else remember if it ever got
released?

Pat