A US military organisation claims it may have found the doomed Mars Polar Lander spacecraft on the Martian surface, confirming earlier reports.
NASA's MPL was due to land near the Martian south pole in December 1999. But mission controllers failed to contact it following the descent.
The reasons were unclear, but experts have suggested that a software error prevented thrusters switching on to slow the spacecraft down as it plunged towards the Red Planet's surface. The spacecraft would then have hit the ground at high speed and broken up.
To try to identify the crash site, NASA gave Mars Global Surveyor photos of the Martian south pole to experts at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, a military organisation that extracts information from surveillance photos. "They were given 40 images and they've studied all of them," NIMA spokeswoman Jennifer Lafley told New Scientist.
"NIMA has provided NASA with an unclassified report that says that NIMA believes it has located the MPL"' she added. MPL was 3.6 metres wide and its parachute was 6.0 m wide. The best resolution images available have a pixel size of 1.4 m.
If NIMA has found MPL and it is intact, NASA will have to reconsider the reasons for losing contact with the spacecraft.
NIMA and NASA are now discussing technical details before any information is released.
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