December 06, 2006
More than awesome...
NewScientistSpace: It is a feat millions of times more impressive than finding a needle in a haystack. The new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted about a dozen spacecraft on the Martian surface and, incredibly, taken pictures of such sharpness that scientists have been able to identify individual rocks that were first photographed by the Viking landers in 1976.
The new series of pictures released late on Monday show both of the Viking landers, never spotted from orbit before, as well as their nearby heat shields and backshells. These are the top and bottom covers of the capsules in which the rovers decended through the Martian atmosphere to land...
You can see a Viking parachute still lying where it fell 30 years ago!
Thanks to Alan Sullivan...
Posted by John Weidner at December 6, 2006 12:44 PMComments
Very cool. I'm surprised the parachute is still in the same place. Mars is notorious for its windstorms, but then it is very thin "air" and a lot less gravity. I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Posted by: Mike Plaiss at December 6, 2006 01:04 PMEven Cooler, IMO anyways...
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/12/06/liquid-water-on-mars/
What I want, of course, is to bring those landers home, stick 'em in a museum, and tell my great-grand kids how, back in my day, we couldn't just go gallivanting off to Mars for a vacation...
Posted by: Andrew Cory at December 6, 2006 08:54 PMAndrew:
It won't happen. The Republic of Mars Museum of Exploration and Founding will have first dibs.
