[FPSPACE] Russian Mars 2, 3 landing sites [Our Ref:EXA28144]

[Geert Sassen]

In 'The Difficult Road to Mars' (NASA pub. NP-1999-06-251-HQ) V.G. Perminov mentiones landing coordinates for Mars 3 of  45 deg South and 158 deg West. For Mars 6 landing coordinates are 23 deg 54 min South and 19 deg 25 min West. Mars 2 crashed on the surface before its parachute could open and chances of ever finding that site are almost zero as apparently it was not orientated correctly on separation and did not follow its intended flightpath, it sounds like nobody is sure where exactly it crashed. (There are some coordinates given for Mars 2 but apparently these are its intended landing point, not its actual crash site).

Actually some HiRISE scans of the Mars 6 landing elips where requested and are available on the Net, however as yet nobody has been able to find anything resembling a lander (or a parachute) on them. As far as I know the Mars 3 site has not yet been covered by HiRISE images.

Quite apart from the long time that these landers are already on the surface (probably erasing all traces of parachutes under the dust), landing coordinates are extremely uncertain, especially for Mars 3, and you would need many hundreds of HiRISE images to cover its landing elips, an almost impossible task. I sure hope one day it will be found (it only to solve the riddle of what happened with it) but probably that won't happen untill some future mars colonist accidently stumbles over them...

Regards,

Geert Sassen
(reply to geert at navtools.nl )