Spy Agency May Have Located Mars Polar Lander

By Leonard David Senior Space Writer

posted: 06:49 pm ET 19 March 2001

WASHINGTON – The Mars Polar Lander may have been found -- intact -- by a top-secret spy imagery agency.

The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) has been quietly scanning Mars pictures, looking for the Mars Polar Lander since early December 1999. According to a source close to the NIMA effort, photographic specialists at NIMA think they’ve spotted something. But NASA officials say it’s too early to tell.

The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) dove into the Martian atmosphere on Dec. 3, 1999, heading for a soft landing on the planet's south polar region. But contact was never reestablished after the probe was to have touched down. On Jan. 17, 2000, after a series of efforts to communicate with the spacecraft failed, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who managed the mission, declared it a loss.

NASA contacted NIMA within a few weeks of the lander's failure, said Edward Weiler, head of NASA’s Office of Space Science.

NIMA on patrol

NIMA is a combat support agency of the Department of Defense. The agency has a global mission and unique responsibilities to manage and provide imagery and geo-spatial information to national policymakers and military forces.

A world-class leader in imagery intelligence, NIMA routinely supports the operations of top-secret U.S. national security spacecraft. They employ specialists in maximizing information that can be gleaned from surveillance photography.

"Shortly after the loss of Mars Polar Lander, NIMA and NASA began working together analyzing images of the intended landing site and to try to locate the spacecraft," said Jennifer Lafley, a NIMA spokeswoman.

"At this point, the results of this study are not conclusive, and the agencies are working together on resolving a number of technical questions," Lafley said.

On the surface

According to a SPACE.com source familiar with the search underway, euphoric NIMA experts believe they have identified the Mars Polar Lander. Furthermore, the source said that the lander appears intact on the surface, sitting atop its trio of landing legs. If so, that finding calls to question a failure review board that cited a software glitch and inadequate testing procedures as a likely cause for the probe to smack into Mars’ surface at high speed.

In the past, searches of images relayed by Mars Global Surveyor – still operating around the Red Planet – failed to find the craft itself, its reentry aeroshell, or the vehicle’s parachute.

"If found intact, it would mean that we would have to reexamine our most probable cause of failure," said Noel Hinners, on special assignment for Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado. The aerospace firm built the Mars Polar Lander for NASA.

While not aware of any spotting of the lander by NIMA teams, Hinners said finding the lander perched on the Martian terrain would be welcome news. It would certainly call into question whether the right probable cause was identified as to why Mars Polar Lander disappeared, he said.

"It would also tell me that the 2001 lander that we built and have at the company is perfectly good. We think that anyway…so why not use that asset?" Hinners told SPACE.com. "If it should turn up someplace, we need to go back and make sure that the communications systems and the reconnaissance are such that we can find things better than we did this time around," he said.

Too early to tell

Weiler said it’s too soon to declare any victory about finding the Mars Polar Lander.

"It’s no big secret. They have a lot of expertise in analyzing imagery. They said they would be willing to put some of their best people to spend some spare time on a fun project. They wanted to see if they could pull an image ‘out of the grass,’ so to speak, of looking at Mars Global Surveyor data to search for the Mars Polar Lander," Weiler told SPACE.com.

Weiler said NIMA experts have been searching for the probe for some 14 to 15 months. "They’ve got some initial data. We’ve looked at it and we’ve agreed there’s some technical issues on whether there’s anything there or not," he said.

"We are a couple to several months away from resolving each other's questions and coming to a joint conclusion. We will do this together -- NIMA and NASA," Weiler said.

"If anybody is saying that they have definitively proved to [the] 99 percentile that Mars Polar Lander has or hasn’t been found, they are overstating the situation grossly," Weiler said.

Lafley of NIMA said that when the agencies arrive at firm conclusions, they would make a joint announcement. "In any event, additional images of the intended MPL landing site will be acquired using the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter later this year," she said.