[FPSPACE] MPL [Our Ref:EXA21962]

[Geert Sassen]

Many people (myself included) have been searching the HiRISE images for the MPL but as yet (or at least the latest I heard) it has not been found.

Given the fact that other spacecraft are relatively easy to spot (once you know the location!) in the HiRISE images it is weird that MPL has not yet been found. But not yet the complete landingelips of MPL has been imaged by HiRISE so chances are that the thing is sitting somewhere just outside the present image-sets and it will be found as soon as the remaining parts of the landing elips are covered. Other option is that it crashed to oblivion (pieces to small to spot) or that it went very far off course (outside the landing elips).

There has been a search for Beagle2 as well, with also only a small part of its landing elips as yet covered by HiRISE, also nothing found. But accuracy of the estimated position of Beagle is far less certain then of MPL, so chances of finding any sign of it are far worse. The less certain you are of its position, the more ground you have to cover, and searching those full resolution HiRISE images takes age's...   That's why finding something like Mars 3 or 6 (whose positions might be hundreds of miles off course) is almost impossible, nobody lives that long.

Still this is one of the things where amateurs like us ( ;-) ) can still play a role: the search of such images is so time consuming that there is no (or hardly any) budget available for things like finding 'lost' spacecraft. So only unpayed enthausiasts are working on this most of the time.