Did UA Mars Camera Find Lost Spacecraft?

The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been imaging the planet's surface since 2006.
(Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA)

April 11, 2013

By Alfred McEwen/HiRISE, Guy Webster/JPL and Daniel Stolte/UANews, April 11, 2013

Hardware from a Soviet spacecraft that went silent only seconds after making the first successful soft landing on Mars in 1971 might appear in images taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

In 1971, the former Soviet Union launched the Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions to Mars. Each consisted of an orbiter plus a lander. Both orbiter missions were successful, although the surface of Mars was obscured by a planet-encircling dust storm. The Mars 2 lander crashed, but Mars 3 became the first successful soft landing on the Red Planet. Unfortunately, after just 14.5 seconds transmission from the lander stopped, for unknown reasons.


This set of images from the HiRISE camera shows what might be hardware from the Soviet Union's 1971 Mars 3 lander, found by an Internet group of Russian citizen enthusiasts. See text for a link to a larger version of this image.
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA)

Now, Russian citizen enthusiasts following NASA's Curiosity rover identified what may be the Soviet Mars 3 lander hardware while poring over high-resolution photos taken with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, operated by the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Mounted on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, the camera has been imaging the Martian surface since 2006.

The features in the image resemble four pieces of hardware from the Soviet Mars 3 mission: the parachute, heat shield, terminal retrorocket and lander. A follow-up image by the orbiter from last month shows the same features.

Images of the possible Mars 3 features are available on the UA HiRISE website and the NASA JPL Photojournal.

The predicted landing site was at latitude 45 degrees south, longitude 202 degree east, in Ptolemaeus Crater. The HiRISE camera acquired a large image at this location in November 2007. This image contains 1.8 billion pixels of data, so about 2,500 typical computer screens would be needed to view the entire image at full resolution. Promising candidates for the hardware from Mars 3 were found only very recently.


Tasked with taking pictures of the Martian surface and measure properties of the atmosphere and soil, the Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions consisted of identical spacecraft, each with a bus/orbiter module and an attached descent/lander module. Mars 2 crashed. Mars 3 made a successful touchdown, but stopped transmitting after 14.5 seconds for unknown reasons.
(Image: NASA)

Vitali Erogov from Russia is the founder and administrator of the largest Russian Internet community about Curiosity. Subscribers of this community engaged in the preliminary search for Mars 3 via crowdsourcing. Expected hardware included the parachute, the heat shield, the terminal brake rocket and the actual lander.

Erogov made scale models of what each piece should look like at the HiRISE image scale and carefully searched the many small features in this large image, finding what appear to be viable candidates in the southern part of the scene. Each candidate has a size and shape consistent with the expected hardware, and they are arranged on the surface as expected from the entry, descent and landing sequence.

One of the group's advisors was Alexander "Sasha" Basilevsky, who is well known to the international science community. Basilevsky contacted Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for HiRISE, suggesting a follow-up image.

MRO acquired this image on March 10. The image was targeted to cover some of the hardware candidates in color and to get a second look with different illumination angles, to provide more information. No color anomalies are seen in the images, which is understandable after more than 40 years of dust deposition. Meanwhile, Basilevsky and Erogov contacted Russian engineers and scientists who worked on Mars 3 for some more information.

The candidate parachute is the most distinctive and unusual feature in the images. It is an especially bright spot for this region, about 25 feet in diameter. The parachute would have a diameter of about 36 feet if fully spread out over the surface, so this is consistent. In the second HiRISE image, the parachute appears to have brightened over much of its surface, probably due to its better illumination over the sloping surface, but it is also possible that the parachute brightened in the intervening years because dust was removed.

HiRISE recently showed that the Curiosity parachute has shifted in the wind, which might also kick off dust. Since the parachute from Viking Lander 1 (1976) can still be seen as a bright area, it is reasonable that a slightly older parachute would also remain visible, perhaps because dust is kicked off.

"The bright spot is definitely an unusual feature," said McEwen. "There is no similar feature anywhere else on these images, which we would expect if it was a natural bright spot of some sort. In the second image with more overhead illumination, it is clearly the brightest spot here."

McEwen added that it differs from the parachutes used by U.S. Mars landers because it isn't elongated due to the lateral velocity of the backshell attached to the parachute. The Soviet design resulted in a vertical descent that is expected to leave a more circular parachute on the ground.

The descent module or retrorocket was attached to the lander container by a chain, and the candidate feature has the right size and even shows a linear extension that could be a chain. Erogov was later informed that at a length length of slightly under 15 feet, the chain is a good match to the line in the image (almost 16 feet). This might have resulted from dragging the chain and disturbing the surface. Nearby the candidate descent module is a feature with the right size and shape to be the actual lander, with four open petals.

The image of the candidate heat shield matches a shield-shaped object with the right size that is partly buried.

"Together, this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out," McEwen said. "Further analysis of the data and future images to better understand the 3-dimensional shapes may help to confirm this interpretation."

"I wanted to attract people's attention to the fact that Mars exploration today is available to practically anyone," Egorov said. "At the same time we were able to connect with the history of our country, which we were reminded of after many years through the images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter."

HiRISE, operated by the UA, was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and Curiosity are managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.