After that last post, you may not want to hear more bad news, but I have both good and bad from NASA.
First, the bad: Mars Global Surveyor, the workhorse orbiter that has been circling the Red Planet since 1997 and recently failed, may have had bad software uploaded. According to SpaceRef, John McNamee from the Mars Exploration Program said that the new software tried to synch up two processors, but some data got overwritten. This doomed the spacecraft, McNamee said, pointing it the wrong way. Eventually the battery overheated and that was that.
This is not yet official (I’ll note it’s not on the NASA site, but they sometimes take, ah, quite a while to post news — the NASA MGS site still says the spacecraft is operational) but it sounds legit. However, my friend James Oberg, who knows quite a bit about this sort of thing, told me he has his doubts that this is the whole story. We’ll find out more soon. For now, do not accept this version as being correct.
Now the good news: HiRISE has imaged the landing site of the Mars Pathfinder Mission! That’s cool. Pathfinder, with its Sojourner rover, put NASA back on the surface of Mars in 1997 for the first time since Viking. The rover lasted much longer than expected, and even though it was designed as a technology tester, it returned a lot of solid science.
That’s a small bit of the whole image, of course– click to see more. They have not positively identified the rover yet, which is too bad, but it’s in that image somewhere!
On the HiRISE images page they also have a topographical map of the landing site:
That’s not from HiRISE data, it’s from Pathfinder itself. Again, it’s only a small piece of a much larger and much cooler image, so click it to see the big one.
HiRISE has previously spotted the Viking and MER landing sites as well. It’s important to get orbital images of these spots, since we have what is called "ground truth". What’s seen from orbit can then be compared to what’s seen from ground, allowing cross-calibration of the two, and also helping to get context for the images.
Also, of course, it’s just cool. Don’t let anyone fool you, either: that’s a fine (though secondary) reason to do it.
January 12th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
URL problem under that topo map from Pathfinder. Delete the extra ‘l’ in “.htmll”
January 12th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Oops! Fixed. Thanks!
January 12th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Too bad for the Surveyor. It was a workhorse.
You can’t send bad software to computers. GIGO.
Look what happened to HAL! It wasn’t sent bad software. It wasn’t told to lie. It was merely told to withhold truth. And that was enough to fry its circuits and turn it homicidal!
January 12th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Sheesh, BA — don’t you EVER read your email?
The running theory isn’t that a bad software update took out MGS, it was a parameter update (McNamee apparently repeated a somewhat mangled version of things). More details here:
http://geekcounterpoint.net/files/GC052B.html
On an unrelated note, today (1/12/2007) would be the 100th birthday of Sergey Korolyov — the brains behind the Soviet space program. So if you like space exploration, toss back a cold shot of vodka for Sergey (you could make the case that he pretty much started the “space race” all by himself).
Lorne
(podcast episode on Korolyov on my site, too…)
January 14th, 2007 at 7:29 am
[...] “Mars News, good and bad“, no Bad Astronomy; [...]
January 15th, 2007 at 12:26 am
I thought the landing site was more flat. Looks quite different in these images.