In an odd bit of timing, scientists are asking the public for help with finding a polar lander that disappeared at Mars eight years ago just as NASA is attempting to land a similar spacecraft on the planet’s pole.
Scientists at the University of Arizona have released high-resolution images of the landing area where the Mars Polar Lander was to have touched down on December 3, 1999. NASA lost contact with the spacecraft after it entered the atmosphere; officials believe the lander smashed into the planet at high speed because of a design flaw in its landing system.
The loss of the spacecraft was the low-point of NASA’s otherwise highly successful effort to explore the Red Planet. Ten weeks earlier, the agency had lost the Mars Climate Orbiter as it was attempting a tricky aerobraking maneuver in the planet’s upper atmosphere. Investigators found that both metric and Imperial units were used in control software, causing the orbiter to burn up in the atmosphere.
The search for the missing lander comes as NASA is preparing to place its Mars Phoenix Lander at the north pole on May 25. The spacecraft, which was proposed by the University of Arizona, makes use of several backup instruments built for the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander program. The main lander was originally built for a 2001 mission that NASA canceled in the wake of its twin failures in 1999.