As rays of sunshine glint off the frosted surface of Mars, scientists in California are preparing an ambitious search effort to locate a spacecraft that went missing there as it prepared to land six years ago.
If all goes according to plan, the carbon dioxide frost over the martian landscape will melt enough to leave a clear view of the ground as NASA's orbiter, Mars Global Surveyor, approaches the intended landing site. As it hurtles overhead, the orbiter will roll in the sky, giving its camera the best chance to snap the missing spacecraft, or remains of it.
If the team is successful in taking a picture of the missing probe, the Mars Polar Lander, it will help to lay to rest a big question that has been hanging over all of those involved in the mission; what went wrong? The answer will help to ensure that future missions do not suffer the same fate.
ILLUSTRATION: JUNE HSU
The search for Mars Polar Lander is only the latest in what has become an intriguing sideline. Mars and the Moon, especially, are littered with machines that were lobbed from Earth and lie scattered across the coldest of landscapes. Once the pinnacle of technology, they have become exhibits in a celestial museum of human space exploration.
The team operating the camera on Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) were asked by NASA officials to hunt for Mars Polar Lander shortly after it disappeared in December 1999. Last month, they said they might finally have spotted it. Images from a previous orbit show what looks to be a parachute and a bright speck surrounded by a dark stain, conceivably the probe lying in the blast zone created by its landing rockets. But the images are poor and far from conclusive.
"We don't know if it is the Mars Polar Lander, but it's a good candidate," said Ken Edgett, from Malin Space Sciences.
In an attempt to nail down whether they have located the missing lander, in a few months, when the Martian summer is at its peak, the scientists will use a new technique that enables MGS to take sharper pictures. As the orbiter flies by, it is instructed to pitch over, allowing the camera to dwell on its target for longer. Instead of only spotting objects 1.5m across, it should pick out anything larger than half a metre.
For Rich Zurek, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the search has particular significance. Zurek worked as lead scientist on Mars Polar Lander and devoted five years to the project.
"It's unfinished business, both emotionally and scientifically," he said. "If we knew where it was on the surface, that alone would rule out some of the failure mechanisms that have been hypothesized."
The leading theory is that the deployment of the lander's legs triggered a software glitch that fooled the probe into thinking it had touched down when it was still high above the surface.
"When it started firing its rockets to slow its descent, it thought, `oh, I'm already down,' and shut them off, so it probably fell 50m or more," Zurek said.
Building a Reputation
Hopefully, any pictures MGS can grab of Mars Polar Lander will confirm what went wrong, and prevent the same mistakes happening again.
"We already have another lander based on the same design, so understanding where it went wrong is crucial," Zurek said. "If our idea of what happened is right, it really amounts to the inversion of a few lines of software code and to have come so close, that's a frustration, but it's also motivation to do it right next time."
The group at Malin Space Sciences is already building a reputation for finding old spacecraft on Mars. Last month, they released images of Viking 2, the probe that touched down on the planet in 1976 and took some of the most recognizable images of its landscape.
"It was spinechilling to see it," Edgett said. "Not only is this the lander, but you can see its shape and it's been sitting there nearly 30 years."
The position of Viking 2 is invaluable to scientists, as it puts all of the images it took in context.
"Once you know where it landed, where those pictures were taken from, you can better interpret them," Edgett said. "All of a sudden, all the things it saw from the ground fall into place."
Of course, among the lost probes on Mars is Britain's own Beagle 2, and the possibility that the Malin scientists might be able to find it was not lost on Beagle's lead scientist, Colin Pillinger.
Hope was that Mars Express, the European Space Agency probe that flicked Beagle 2 towards Mars before going into orbit itself, would be able to join the hunt, but its cameras have not yet been any help.
"When Beagle went missing we got in touch with Malin and they've been exceedingly helpful. Remember, though, we're looking for a few pixels out of three billion," Pillinger said.
So far, the group at Malin Space Sciences has searched about 70 per cent of the region in which Beagle 2 should have landed. Last August, they thought they might have found it, but it turned out to be a false alarm.
"We used the new technique with the camera and found it wasn't hardware, but a tiny sand dune that was out of place," Edgett said.
Finding Beagle 2 is going to be a tougher job than many, simply because it is so tiny. If it is still in its capsule, if the parachutes didn't come out, or if the airbags didn't deploy, it could well be beyond the capability of the MGS camera, said Edgett. If the Malin team can find Beagle 2, it will give the team behind the probe the excruciating knowledge of just how close they got.
"A lot of the team who designed the engineering took a lot of the flak. If we could find it, we could at least say, well, we got so far, so close, and we could do it if we were given the opportunity again," Pillinger said.
He may not have too long to wait.
"We don't know if we're going to find anything, but we are still looking. The search will go on," Edgett said.
In the Attic
While Mars has become a sparse junkyard of modern space technology, the Moon is more of an attic, home to discarded machines that were put up there decades ago, and now aged enough to achieve iconic status. There are the landing stages of the Apollo missions that first put man on the Moon. There are dusty Soviet Lunokhod rovers. Alan Shepard's golf balls are still lying around somewhere on the Moon, and what could beat the original Moon buggies as an insight into the priorities of the early US space program?
"There's a lot of junk up there. One of the last things the astronauts did before heading back to their command module before blasting off was to empty their garbage and toss out all sorts of things, particularly when they were returning with a lot of lunar rock samples," said Peter Golkin, at the Smithsonian Institute's National Space and Air Museum in Washington.
There are also more poignant items among the junk. Many astronauts took pictures of their families to the Moon and left them behind. There is a small memorial to dead astronauts.
Much of the Moon junk is testimony to the ingenuity of the scientists behind the early space missions. Apollo astronauts took experiments to the Moon that were set up and left running on power from small nuclear batteries. One of the experiments used seismometers to monitor vibrations in the Moon, to pick up any internal geological activity or detect the impact of any meteorites or asteroids that hit. The snag was how to calibrate the seismometers. The solution scientists hit on was effective, if blunt.
On blasting off, the astronauts would fire the spent booster stage directly at the Moon.
"They knew its mass and velocity, so they'd crash it into the Moon and know exactly what sort of impact it should register," said Dave Williams, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
In the short term, it falls to European scientists to grab pictures of space history on the Moon. Earlier this year, the European Space Agency's Smart-1 probe, which is in orbit around the Moon, took pictures of the original Apollo landing sites and spotted the places where two Soviet probes touched down. Right now, Smart-1 is probably in too high an orbit to pick out any hardware that is lying around.
Should Smart-1 fail to stumble across any of the old Moon probes, the task may be passed on to another mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is due to launch in 2008. With higher resolution cameras, it should be able to take unprecedented images of the lunar surface and the technological detritus that litters it.
The sheer tonnage of historic junk left on the Moon and Mars has prompted some to wonder who owns it all. Could someone ultimately salvage it for their own private collection? According to Golkin, UN guidelines are already in place to cover such an eventuality.
Put bluntly, the UN's Outer Space Treaty states that any probe remains the property of its terrestrial owner regardless of where it ends up.
The Smithsonian Institute has a deal with NASA that gives it first refusal on any old mission hardware.
"Because there seem to be no impending visits to the Moon by eager souvenir hunters, this hasn't been considered a very pressing issue," Golkin said.
As Malin Space Sciences prepares to search for the Mars Polar Lander, Rich Zurek is readying another probe that might join the hunt. On Aug. 10, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is due to blast off with a camera that can pick out objects as small as 30cm across.
The satellite is due to arrive in Mars orbit in March next year.
"Maybe we'll find it, maybe we won't," he said. "There are a lot of things to look at on Mars, and at some point you have to accept that these old landers, well, they're just chunks of metal now."
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