Orbiter to look for lost-to-Mars probes

By Leonard David

Senior space writer

updated 6:40 p.m. ET Nov. 2, 2006

A super-powerful camera orbiting Mars may help discover the fate of long-lost spacecraft that never phoned home after reaching the Red Planet.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is now circling that planet, equipped to assist in determining whether life ever arose on Mars and characterize its climate and geology, as well as prepare for future expeditionary crews to land there.

But another sharp-shooting skill of MRO is catching sight of past probes — craft that ran into trouble and died in the line of Mars duty. That includes NASA’s gone but not forgotten Mars Polar Lander and the British-built Beagle 2.

MRO is outfitted with an array of equipment — including the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE, built to provide the most detailed view of Mars’ surface to date. From Mars orbit, MRO can take zoom-in images of objects on the surface of the planet, checking out features that are about the size of a small dining room table.

NASA’s Mars Polar Lander was shot toward the Red Planet in January 1999, only to be lost on Dec. 3 that same year as the probe neared its south pole exploration target. What truly happened to the craft and its exact whereabouts remain best guesses.

An investigation of the loss concluded that the most probable cause of the failure was due to the generation of bogus signals when the craft’s legs were deployed high above the Martian landscape. Those spurious signals are thought to have produced a false indication that the spacecraft’s outstretched legs had actually reached Mars.

That misread of its true altitude may have resulted in Mars Polar Lander prematurely shutting down its set of descent engines. Then, it is thought, the craft fell to an ugly ending within Mars’ south pole region.

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“We’ll search for Mars Polar Lander when the lighting conditions are good. Right now it’s too dark down there,” said Alfred McEwen, Director of the Planetary Image Research Lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is MRO’s HiRISE principal investigator.

As for when the first opportunity to utilize HiRISE to look for Mars Polar Lander, McEwen told Space.com that he hasn’t focused on a time frame as yet. “It’s a matter of both illumination angle and atmospheric conditions.”

Seasonal snows
The Mars Polar Lander site is on the edge of polar night right now, as Mars is not quite half-way through its southern winter, explained Richard Zurek, MRO’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Zurek said that even when spring comes again to the southern hemisphere on Mars — Feb. 8, 2007 — the seasonal snows made largely of carbon dioxide ice will still cover the high southern latitudes. These won’t be gone from the area until the latter part of May of next year, he added.

“Right now, MRO is focusing on the high northern latitudes, providing information for the Phoenix mission to use in selecting their landing site,” Zurek told Space.com. That will be the main focus for MRO until the end of the calendar year, he said, as Mars moves into late northern winter and observing conditions deteriorate over the north polar area.

NASA’s Phoenix lander is to be launched next year, the first in a series of Scout-class spacecraft. It is also a resurrected Mars Polar Lander mission but this time headed for Mars’ water-ice-rich northern polar region.

Early next year the focus will shift to looking at Mars Science Laboratory candidate sites, Zurek pointed out. That probe is a hefty wheeled rover to be dispatched to the Red Planet in 2009.

“MRO will look at a few of those even before the end of the year, as southern spring and summer are seasons when dust suspended in the atmosphere is more extensive and opaque,” Zurek continued. “Of course, unless there is a planet-encircling storm this year, there will still be good seeing over many areas, but local activity and regional storms introduce a more random element and a more diffuse background haze. So, MRO will try to get an early look in areas that are more prone to obscuring dust activity.”

It’s clear that MRO is going to be one busy bird as Mars researchers hope to work through a list of roughly 50 or more Mars Science Laboratory targets prior to a landing site workshop in October 2007.

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