Scientist May Have Found Remains of Mars Lander

Nearly six years after NASA’s Mars Polar Lander vanished during a landing attempt on the Red Planet, a scientist said he had spotted what appeared to be wreckage of the spacecraft.

The observation came during a reexamination of grainy black-and-white images taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor, which searched for the probe with no success in 1999 and 2000.

“The observation of a single, small dot at the center of the disturbed location suggests that the vehicle remained more or less intact after its fall,” wrote Michael Malin, president and chief scientist of the company that operates Global Surveyor’s camera, Malin Space Science Systems of San Diego.

Malin makes his case in the July issue of Sky & Telescope magazine. A copy of his article was posted Thursday on the magazine’s website.

Global Surveyor will take higher-resolution images later this year to try to confirm the missing lander’s location.

“It looks intriguing,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars program. He said the images showed one possible location of the missing Polar Lander, but that more images were needed.

The $165-million lander was headed for touchdown near Mars’ south pole Dec. 3, 1999, when contact was lost. A NASA team concluded a rocket engine shut off too soon, causing the craft to plummet about 130 feet to almost certain destruction.

A reexamination of images of the surface of Mars taken after the Polar Lander’s disappearance show a white patch that could be a parachute. A few hundred yards away, scientists noted a dark area, possibly made from rocket blast marks, with a tiny white dot in the center that could be the lander.

The lander’s disappearance was a blow to NASA, which had lost the lander’s $125-million sibling spacecraft, the Mars Climate Orbiter, three months earlier. That spacecraft apparently burned up as it was about to enter orbit.