NASA Mars Orbiter Spots Lost 1971 Soviet Lander on Red Planet

In 1971, the Soviet Union landed a spacecraft on Mars. Now, images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter may reveal pieces of hardware from the mission.

The findings weren't made by NASA scientists, though. Instead, Russian citizen enthusiasts who were following news about NASA's Curiosity rover discovered four features in a five-year-old image from the orbiter that resemble four pieces of hardware from the Soviet Mars 3 mission. They were able to see what appeared to be the parachute, heat shield, terminal retrorocket and lander. A follow-up image by the orbiter from just last month also showed the same features, which lends further evidence to the citizens' findings.

In 1971, the former Soviet Union launched two missions to Mars--the Mars 2 and the Mars 3. Each consisted of an orbiter plus a lander. Both of the missions actually succeeded. However, the surface of the planet was obscured by a massive dust storm which caused complications for the missions. The Mars 2 crashed into the Red Planet whil the Mars 3 was slightly more successful. It was able to land, but didn't last for very long. It was only able to transmit for 14.5 seconds before failing. That said, it was the first spacecraft to actually survive a Mars landing long enough to transmit anything. Because of this, the lander is an important part of space history.

"Together, this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out," said HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen in a news release. "Further analysis of the data and future images to better understand the three-dimensional shapes may help confirm this interpretation."

The landing site for the Mars 3 mission is predicted to be in the Ptolemaeus Crater on Mars. The image of the location, which HiRISE acquired in November 2007, contains 1.8 billion pixels of data. Promising candidates for the hardware from Mars 3 were found in December 2012.

The new findings actually bring attention to the fact that space exploration is available to almost anyone who combs through publically available images today. Citizens can make discoveries of their own.

"I wanted to attract people's attention to the fact that Mars exploration today is available to practically anyone," said Vitali Egorov, who heads the largest Russian Internet community about Curiosity, in a press release. "At the same time we were able to connect with the history of our country, which we were reminded of after many years through the images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter."