How we looked for Mars 3
Honestly, it almost happened to happen that such news came to the beginning of April and Cosmonautics Day. Today I will talk about how the story that began and broke off more than 40 years ago, suddenly got a sequel in our days. About how a simple username on VKontakte, in his interest in Mars, reached NASA. The fact that international solidarity of scientists is not an empty sound. And that space is closer than it seems.
We were looking for Mars-3 .
And we found it! Right on Mars, at the bottom of the giant crater of Ptolemy, among lifeless wastelands and boulders.
')
How we did it, today's story.
It all started on Habré ...
No, it began, of course, on May 28 of distant 1971, when the Soviet research station Mars-3 was launched to Mars. But for me personally, everything started on Habré at the end of November 2012, with one half-joking comment about NASA: “They found the old Soviet rover there ...” At that time I was sure that all the “old Mars rovers” were found long ago, because the places of their landings are known. But to test my knowledge, I went to the HiRise website and was surprised to find out that nothing was found! That is, the location of all successful devices is known, and all of them are photographed by a HiRise camera on a NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite with a detail of 30 cm per pixel. But with the Fails, the situation is not so unambiguous. Americans on Mars dropped Mars Polar Lander, Europeans - Beagle 2, USSR - Mars-6 and Mars-2 and none of this was found, although they were looking for. And what about Mars 3? It turned out that no one had seen him either.
Our device, which made a phenomenal, the first in the history of a successful landing on Mars more than 40 years ago! He proved that this is real, and he did it in almost the same sequence in which the Americans planted Curiosity in 2012. In general, see for yourself:
( I love this video. They could have started the ship and made a movie )
So, Mars-3 sat successfully - it is known for sure, because he began a broadcast, but it is impossible without expanded antennas. But after 14 seconds, the broadcast stopped, leaving a puzzle for the designers about the reasons for the shutdown, and to the enthusiasts of astronautics and photoshop - the first ever photograph of Mars.
What they just didn’t do with it, what filters they didn’t impose, just to play along with their imagination and see the horizon, mountain slopes and Martian clouds or clouds of dust from the storm that was raging then.
But the whole trick is that this is part of the photo panorama, and to view from the perspective in which the camera was shot, this frame must be rotated 90 degrees. According to the designers' plans, the photo should have turned out like this:
( This is a frame from Luna-9, which has a lot in common with Mars-3 )
Those. if you superimpose one on the other, it will look like this:
In general, no valuable information was transmitted from the surface, the first rover never stepped onto the surface of Mars, since fastened to the top of the module, but the psychological victory was achieved - they were the first to put their apparatus on another planet! The reason for the shutdown has not been determined. Someone assumes a corona discharge in antennas and sins on a storm, someone suspects a battery. In general, the future settlers will have something to do.
Then there were other expeditions, other successes and failures, and the metal "flower" gradually faded into oblivion. Generations and states changed, the Internet, Habr and VKontakte appeared. And there was my interest in Mars-3.
Turning to the HiRise website, I found only a snapshot of 2007 entitled Center of Soviet Mars 3 Landing Ellipse . This was a discovery for me, because I was so confident in the omnipotence of NASA and HIRise that I expected to see an exact indication of where our station is located. A quick search in the network also failed. Those. it was obvious that Mars-3 was never found. I downloaded a full-size snapshot (1.3 GB), opened it, and understood why in five years no one had found the station.
Imagine a search on a rectangle 6 for 20 kilometers of a round object 1.5 meters wide. I know that many now thought that it was necessary to write a program that would itself be looking for a station. But I think such a search is impossible until artificial intelligence has been created. Yes, the program could highlight interesting boulders of the appropriate size.
But there are thousands of such objects, since the crater, from which the rock scattered like a fan, is next to it.
2 billion pixels, among which it is necessary to find an object 8 by 8 pixels.
Here is a fragment in original size:
I looked at the volume of work and realized that without a collective mind can not do here. By that time, about 4 thousand people were already in the Curiosity-Mars rover group, and I offered subscribers a space-patriotic quest: to find Mars-3. To do this, I cut a large photo into 20 strips, uploaded them to the network and invited everyone to take part in the search. More than a dozen enthusiasts responded, they began to look at the fragments and upload the most interesting finds into a separate album . It was found a lot of curious, but no one showed an exact match:
By its location and shape, the object in the lower right corner can be called a brake cone or, in NASA terminology, a heat shield with some degree of confidence. The Americans agreed with this with the proviso that “it’s better not to find a candidate anyway.” He was found by two search participants: Ya Zaero and Aku Neko .
As soon as we started searching, there were people who were more sophisticated in googling and they quickly found a link on the “Cosmonautics News” forum topic in which user Imhotep posted a snapshot of the picture, which most likely shows the parachute of Mars-3.
.
But we finished viewing the entire field of the image, and Mars-3 itself was never found. For verification, I put all the interesting finds on a small scale map to see if there is any connection between them. And almost all by. Relatively, only the parachute and the brake cone coincided, but then I did not attach any importance to this.
Then I decided to “dance from the stove” and concentrate on the parachute. That is, I took as a basis the hypothesis that it is he who is. The problem of the search was that I did not know what radius the structural elements could fly. Therefore, I took materials on the American missions: Viking-1-2, Phoenix Lander, Mars Pathfinder, put Mars-3 on the landing site, and plotted the maximum radius that NASA vehicles flew from their parachute. I carried out the most interesting objects on a separate scheme, where I placed them in approximate accordance with their position on the ground. It turned out this picture:
( Scale reduced. ).
But there was not enough time and effort to search. I did not finish the scheme, and, as it turned out, the radius I had planned did not include the landing elements - our apparatus “scattered” more than the American ones.
In my search and Martian interests, I went to the Canadian scientist Philip J Stooke . At one time he was looking for (but mistakenly determined) Lunokhod-2 in LRO pictures. He suggested the most important point that proved decisive - the direction of flight of the descent module. He said: "The flight went east." This made it possible to immediately cut off 50% of the unnecessary field and concentrate searches in the optimal direction.
I singled out a sector that covered four times the larger radius than the American experience showed, and continued to methodically review the frame. It took several evenings and, to be honest, I was desperate to find anything, but I continued just out of a desire to finish the job. When I announced a massive search, I actually made a commitment that people's efforts would not be wasted (although I warned that the probability of detection is extremely small ). In any case, I had to check in order to say with confidence “Finding is impossible” or “Found!”
It turned out as a result - "Found!".
Initially, I concentrated my searches on the module, which was to be determined by its cruciform "petals". According to them, I just identified this object. A soft-fit engine, coupled with a parachute container that showed up nearby, turned out to be a valuable bonus. I was based on the film, and there this detail "disappears" before landing, so I did not look for it. In fact, the final stage took place in the following sequence:
So found! But what next?
I could write about it on Habré or write on the same forum "Astronautics News", but there are already enough of these seekers who see Mars-3 in each hummock, and a parachute in each sand dune. Evidence was needed.
Here Phil Knock helped again. He looked at my find, agreed that it was very interesting, and advised me to highlight in the vicinity some more objects that are similar in size and shape to a descent module. This had to be done in order to show that my find was the most convincing one.
I did it, and it turned out this sheet:
( Clickable. 1 mb )
More precisely, there were two of them, but I think that for example and one is enough. Under the first number is Mars 3 itself (the most persuasive candidate). Of course, this sample is not quite representative, because it was compiled when I already knew the correct answer, but I tried to select the most similar ones. Fortunately, there were no large piles of stones, as in the photo above, in the search sector.
But this is only one argument in favor of my find. It was necessary to find more convincing evidence, but I could not make it on my own. It was necessary to take a repeated picture of the terrain at a different time of the day in order to determine the shape of objects by the nature of the change in the shadow. It was necessary to obtain information about the length of the cable that connected the parachute container and the engine of a soft landing. The last moment could not only confirm, but also refute my guess, which is in good agreement with Popper's criterion , which all scientific theories must comply with. The length that is observed in the picture corresponds to 4.8 meters. If a discrepancy of at least a meter were found, one could forget about the honor of the discoverer.
Here the question arises: how could a thin cable be noticeable in pictures with a detail of 25 cm per pixel?
If you look at the Opportunity photo, you can see the shadow of its mast.
Although in reality its thickness does not exceed 15 cm:
Those. HiRise sees even what it should not see.
But even 15 cm cable is difficult to imagine in this role, but I thought that sand could be swept along it, and we see not a cable, but a small ridge that arose along it due to the wind. Further research has shown that even in such assumptions there is no need.
HiRise shot this site only once, and there is no information on the length of the cable in a few open sources. The most informative source is the book "The Difficult Road to Mars " by VG Perminova (by the way, published by NASA in English). But even there the necessary information was not found.
Therefore, I turned to Alexander Bazilevsky, Professor, Head of the Laboratory for Comparative Planetology at the Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry named after VI Vernadsky (GEOKHI). He was mentioned on Wikipedia in an article about Lunokhod-2, so I thought that he would be interested in the Martian theme. At first he was skeptical: “ we need an argument - why do you think that this object is what you think. The argument that one of my friends used: Blind, who does not see it, does not pass here ”.
I prepared a diagram on which I displayed everything that I “see” and how I see:
And convinced the same! Of course, like any scientist, Alexander Tikhonovich emphasized his doubts and always pointed out in his correspondence "elements of Mars-3, as Vitaly saw." But at the same time he wrote to the head of the research group of the HiRise camera Alfred McUen .
The answer of the American was quick and unexpected for me: “If we can learn more”.
Like this! I don’t know whether my illustrations were so convincing, or whether Basilevsky’s international authority is so high that, on the first appeal, NASA agreed to correct the apparatus’s work in the Martian orbit, in order to dwell in the place where something seemed simple to the boy from the Soviet Russia.
While NASA was aiming, Bazilevsky “infected” with my find Arnold Selivanov , the head of the RCC scientific and technical center and one of the founders of Mars-3. He, too, quickly overcame initial skepticism and made efforts to re-examine information on his part. It was necessary to establish the length of the notorious cable on the engine soft landing. This could be done only by getting into the bowels of the NPO them. Lavochkin. With the suggestion of Selivanov, one of the NGO engineers, Vladimir Molodtsov, set off for this feat.
For me, there is a lull in this matter: HiRise is plowing the near-Martian expanses, Vladimir is expanses of NPO Lavochkina.
Trying to extract at least some information from an available photo, I calculated the height of the intended module based on the length of the shadow and the angle of illumination. It turned out 78 cm. The real height of Mars-3 is 75 cm (the ratio of height to width in the unfolded state is 1/2). A small plus argument, but the main evidence had to wait.
Weeks went by, April was near.
The first news came from our side, from Vladimir: "The chains connecting the solid propellant solid propellant rocket motor motor vehicle with a parachute container have a length of 4.52 meters. "
Bingo! 4.8 on Mars, 4.5 in the drawings. The error is within 1.5 pixels. Especially visible 0.3 m are just suitable for the engine. It was just a great gift. We hurried to share it with the Americans, and in response we received a message that was no less positive:
A few days later they sent the finished result:
( Clickable. 3 mb )
By the way, the picture they received is lower in quality than the 2007 frame, due to the higher amount of dust in the atmosphere, but the color field of the camera captured the module itself. However, this did not give us any color information, since if it was painted in any color, the paint would be discolored under ultraviolet rays, and the surface would be covered with a layer of dust.
But now we can compare "it was-become" and look at the field from different angles of illumination.
New pictures look paler also because the sun is higher at the zenith, the shadows are shorter and everything seems flatter.
Then we agreed on a press release for another week. This, by the way, also emphasizes NASA's ethics - they could calmly write on their own, even with the mention of us. However, perhaps these are just international principles of cooperation. Unfortunately, they could not place the names of everyone who helped me in the search on the NASA site, but did so on the NASA JPL site.
The result of our activities, searches, evidence and archival excavations - on the NASA website.
And now about the case: Mars-6 has not yet been found!
I would like to invite readers to make their contribution to the history of the national astronautics. You could rush to the Hirise website, review the pictures and find something suitable. But from the point of view of popularization, it would be more effective to make an application on Android and iOs, which would allow viewing individual fragments of pictures and highlighting the most interesting sections. Something like the Fourth Planet project. And where, if not to turn to Habr with such ideas? I figured that one shot of 25K pixels at 80K pixels will give 8333 fragments of 600x400 pixels. And for Mars-6 there are several such frames, so it will be enough for a long time. I think if you make such an application, it will also be useful for searches of the American Mars Polar Lander and the European Beagle 2.
In the end, than to throw birds into pigs, it’s better to search for lost space stations! I will try to attract any support from Roscosmos, if there is anyone at all thinking about popularizing, or even NASA. Let's open a separate thread on this topic in the comments and open the details.
And, yes, none of this would have happened if it were not for my employers who called to Mars and turned a blind eye to the working hours I spent drowning myself in the gray field of the HiRise image.
And all with the Day of Cosmonautics!
UPD: here the video lecture on the same topic .
We were looking for Mars-3 .
And we found it! Right on Mars, at the bottom of the giant crater of Ptolemy, among lifeless wastelands and boulders.
')
How we did it, today's story.
It all started on Habré ...
No, it began, of course, on May 28 of distant 1971, when the Soviet research station Mars-3 was launched to Mars. But for me personally, everything started on Habré at the end of November 2012, with one half-joking comment about NASA: “They found the old Soviet rover there ...” At that time I was sure that all the “old Mars rovers” were found long ago, because the places of their landings are known. But to test my knowledge, I went to the HiRise website and was surprised to find out that nothing was found! That is, the location of all successful devices is known, and all of them are photographed by a HiRise camera on a NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite with a detail of 30 cm per pixel. But with the Fails, the situation is not so unambiguous. Americans on Mars dropped Mars Polar Lander, Europeans - Beagle 2, USSR - Mars-6 and Mars-2 and none of this was found, although they were looking for. And what about Mars 3? It turned out that no one had seen him either.
Our device, which made a phenomenal, the first in the history of a successful landing on Mars more than 40 years ago! He proved that this is real, and he did it in almost the same sequence in which the Americans planted Curiosity in 2012. In general, see for yourself:
( I love this video. They could have started the ship and made a movie )
So, Mars-3 sat successfully - it is known for sure, because he began a broadcast, but it is impossible without expanded antennas. But after 14 seconds, the broadcast stopped, leaving a puzzle for the designers about the reasons for the shutdown, and to the enthusiasts of astronautics and photoshop - the first ever photograph of Mars.
What they just didn’t do with it, what filters they didn’t impose, just to play along with their imagination and see the horizon, mountain slopes and Martian clouds or clouds of dust from the storm that was raging then.
But the whole trick is that this is part of the photo panorama, and to view from the perspective in which the camera was shot, this frame must be rotated 90 degrees. According to the designers' plans, the photo should have turned out like this:
( This is a frame from Luna-9, which has a lot in common with Mars-3 )
Those. if you superimpose one on the other, it will look like this:
In general, no valuable information was transmitted from the surface, the first rover never stepped onto the surface of Mars, since fastened to the top of the module, but the psychological victory was achieved - they were the first to put their apparatus on another planet! The reason for the shutdown has not been determined. Someone assumes a corona discharge in antennas and sins on a storm, someone suspects a battery. In general, the future settlers will have something to do.
Then there were other expeditions, other successes and failures, and the metal "flower" gradually faded into oblivion. Generations and states changed, the Internet, Habr and VKontakte appeared. And there was my interest in Mars-3.
Turning to the HiRise website, I found only a snapshot of 2007 entitled Center of Soviet Mars 3 Landing Ellipse . This was a discovery for me, because I was so confident in the omnipotence of NASA and HIRise that I expected to see an exact indication of where our station is located. A quick search in the network also failed. Those. it was obvious that Mars-3 was never found. I downloaded a full-size snapshot (1.3 GB), opened it, and understood why in five years no one had found the station.
Imagine a search on a rectangle 6 for 20 kilometers of a round object 1.5 meters wide. I know that many now thought that it was necessary to write a program that would itself be looking for a station. But I think such a search is impossible until artificial intelligence has been created. Yes, the program could highlight interesting boulders of the appropriate size.
But there are thousands of such objects, since the crater, from which the rock scattered like a fan, is next to it.
2 billion pixels, among which it is necessary to find an object 8 by 8 pixels.
Here is a fragment in original size:
I looked at the volume of work and realized that without a collective mind can not do here. By that time, about 4 thousand people were already in the Curiosity-Mars rover group, and I offered subscribers a space-patriotic quest: to find Mars-3. To do this, I cut a large photo into 20 strips, uploaded them to the network and invited everyone to take part in the search. More than a dozen enthusiasts responded, they began to look at the fragments and upload the most interesting finds into a separate album . It was found a lot of curious, but no one showed an exact match:
By its location and shape, the object in the lower right corner can be called a brake cone or, in NASA terminology, a heat shield with some degree of confidence. The Americans agreed with this with the proviso that “it’s better not to find a candidate anyway.” He was found by two search participants: Ya Zaero and Aku Neko .
As soon as we started searching, there were people who were more sophisticated in googling and they quickly found a link on the “Cosmonautics News” forum topic in which user Imhotep posted a snapshot of the picture, which most likely shows the parachute of Mars-3.
.But we finished viewing the entire field of the image, and Mars-3 itself was never found. For verification, I put all the interesting finds on a small scale map to see if there is any connection between them. And almost all by. Relatively, only the parachute and the brake cone coincided, but then I did not attach any importance to this.
Then I decided to “dance from the stove” and concentrate on the parachute. That is, I took as a basis the hypothesis that it is he who is. The problem of the search was that I did not know what radius the structural elements could fly. Therefore, I took materials on the American missions: Viking-1-2, Phoenix Lander, Mars Pathfinder, put Mars-3 on the landing site, and plotted the maximum radius that NASA vehicles flew from their parachute. I carried out the most interesting objects on a separate scheme, where I placed them in approximate accordance with their position on the ground. It turned out this picture:
( Scale reduced. ).
But there was not enough time and effort to search. I did not finish the scheme, and, as it turned out, the radius I had planned did not include the landing elements - our apparatus “scattered” more than the American ones.
In my search and Martian interests, I went to the Canadian scientist Philip J Stooke . At one time he was looking for (but mistakenly determined) Lunokhod-2 in LRO pictures. He suggested the most important point that proved decisive - the direction of flight of the descent module. He said: "The flight went east." This made it possible to immediately cut off 50% of the unnecessary field and concentrate searches in the optimal direction.
I singled out a sector that covered four times the larger radius than the American experience showed, and continued to methodically review the frame. It took several evenings and, to be honest, I was desperate to find anything, but I continued just out of a desire to finish the job. When I announced a massive search, I actually made a commitment that people's efforts would not be wasted (although I warned that the probability of detection is extremely small ). In any case, I had to check in order to say with confidence “Finding is impossible” or “Found!”
It turned out as a result - "Found!".
Initially, I concentrated my searches on the module, which was to be determined by its cruciform "petals". According to them, I just identified this object. A soft-fit engine, coupled with a parachute container that showed up nearby, turned out to be a valuable bonus. I was based on the film, and there this detail "disappears" before landing, so I did not look for it. In fact, the final stage took place in the following sequence:
So found! But what next?
I could write about it on Habré or write on the same forum "Astronautics News", but there are already enough of these seekers who see Mars-3 in each hummock, and a parachute in each sand dune. Evidence was needed.
Here Phil Knock helped again. He looked at my find, agreed that it was very interesting, and advised me to highlight in the vicinity some more objects that are similar in size and shape to a descent module. This had to be done in order to show that my find was the most convincing one.
I did it, and it turned out this sheet:
( Clickable. 1 mb )
More precisely, there were two of them, but I think that for example and one is enough. Under the first number is Mars 3 itself (the most persuasive candidate). Of course, this sample is not quite representative, because it was compiled when I already knew the correct answer, but I tried to select the most similar ones. Fortunately, there were no large piles of stones, as in the photo above, in the search sector.
But this is only one argument in favor of my find. It was necessary to find more convincing evidence, but I could not make it on my own. It was necessary to take a repeated picture of the terrain at a different time of the day in order to determine the shape of objects by the nature of the change in the shadow. It was necessary to obtain information about the length of the cable that connected the parachute container and the engine of a soft landing. The last moment could not only confirm, but also refute my guess, which is in good agreement with Popper's criterion , which all scientific theories must comply with. The length that is observed in the picture corresponds to 4.8 meters. If a discrepancy of at least a meter were found, one could forget about the honor of the discoverer.
Here the question arises: how could a thin cable be noticeable in pictures with a detail of 25 cm per pixel?
If you look at the Opportunity photo, you can see the shadow of its mast.
Although in reality its thickness does not exceed 15 cm:
Those. HiRise sees even what it should not see.
But even 15 cm cable is difficult to imagine in this role, but I thought that sand could be swept along it, and we see not a cable, but a small ridge that arose along it due to the wind. Further research has shown that even in such assumptions there is no need.
HiRise shot this site only once, and there is no information on the length of the cable in a few open sources. The most informative source is the book "The Difficult Road to Mars " by VG Perminova (by the way, published by NASA in English). But even there the necessary information was not found.
Therefore, I turned to Alexander Bazilevsky, Professor, Head of the Laboratory for Comparative Planetology at the Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry named after VI Vernadsky (GEOKHI). He was mentioned on Wikipedia in an article about Lunokhod-2, so I thought that he would be interested in the Martian theme. At first he was skeptical: “ we need an argument - why do you think that this object is what you think. The argument that one of my friends used: Blind, who does not see it, does not pass here ”.
I prepared a diagram on which I displayed everything that I “see” and how I see:
And convinced the same! Of course, like any scientist, Alexander Tikhonovich emphasized his doubts and always pointed out in his correspondence "elements of Mars-3, as Vitaly saw." But at the same time he wrote to the head of the research group of the HiRise camera Alfred McUen .
The answer of the American was quick and unexpected for me: “If we can learn more”.
Like this! I don’t know whether my illustrations were so convincing, or whether Basilevsky’s international authority is so high that, on the first appeal, NASA agreed to correct the apparatus’s work in the Martian orbit, in order to dwell in the place where something seemed simple to the boy from the Soviet Russia.
While NASA was aiming, Bazilevsky “infected” with my find Arnold Selivanov , the head of the RCC scientific and technical center and one of the founders of Mars-3. He, too, quickly overcame initial skepticism and made efforts to re-examine information on his part. It was necessary to establish the length of the notorious cable on the engine soft landing. This could be done only by getting into the bowels of the NPO them. Lavochkin. With the suggestion of Selivanov, one of the NGO engineers, Vladimir Molodtsov, set off for this feat.
For me, there is a lull in this matter: HiRise is plowing the near-Martian expanses, Vladimir is expanses of NPO Lavochkina.
Trying to extract at least some information from an available photo, I calculated the height of the intended module based on the length of the shadow and the angle of illumination. It turned out 78 cm. The real height of Mars-3 is 75 cm (the ratio of height to width in the unfolded state is 1/2). A small plus argument, but the main evidence had to wait.
Weeks went by, April was near.
The first news came from our side, from Vladimir: "The chains connecting the solid propellant solid propellant rocket motor motor vehicle with a parachute container have a length of 4.52 meters. "
Bingo! 4.8 on Mars, 4.5 in the drawings. The error is within 1.5 pixels. Especially visible 0.3 m are just suitable for the engine. It was just a great gift. We hurried to share it with the Americans, and in response we received a message that was no less positive:
A few days later they sent the finished result:
( Clickable. 3 mb )
By the way, the picture they received is lower in quality than the 2007 frame, due to the higher amount of dust in the atmosphere, but the color field of the camera captured the module itself. However, this did not give us any color information, since if it was painted in any color, the paint would be discolored under ultraviolet rays, and the surface would be covered with a layer of dust.
But now we can compare "it was-become" and look at the field from different angles of illumination.
New pictures look paler also because the sun is higher at the zenith, the shadows are shorter and everything seems flatter.
Then we agreed on a press release for another week. This, by the way, also emphasizes NASA's ethics - they could calmly write on their own, even with the mention of us. However, perhaps these are just international principles of cooperation. Unfortunately, they could not place the names of everyone who helped me in the search on the NASA site, but did so on the NASA JPL site.
The result of our activities, searches, evidence and archival excavations - on the NASA website.
And now about the case: Mars-6 has not yet been found!
I would like to invite readers to make their contribution to the history of the national astronautics. You could rush to the Hirise website, review the pictures and find something suitable. But from the point of view of popularization, it would be more effective to make an application on Android and iOs, which would allow viewing individual fragments of pictures and highlighting the most interesting sections. Something like the Fourth Planet project. And where, if not to turn to Habr with such ideas? I figured that one shot of 25K pixels at 80K pixels will give 8333 fragments of 600x400 pixels. And for Mars-6 there are several such frames, so it will be enough for a long time. I think if you make such an application, it will also be useful for searches of the American Mars Polar Lander and the European Beagle 2.
In the end, than to throw birds into pigs, it’s better to search for lost space stations! I will try to attract any support from Roscosmos, if there is anyone at all thinking about popularizing, or even NASA. Let's open a separate thread on this topic in the comments and open the details.
And, yes, none of this would have happened if it were not for my employers who called to Mars and turned a blind eye to the working hours I spent drowning myself in the gray field of the HiRise image.
And all with the Day of Cosmonautics!
UPD: here the video lecture on the same topic .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/175827/
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