Phoenix Mars Lander Set To Touch Down on Sunday
It’s safe to say that many people who are interested in UFOs also follow news in space exploration. On Sunday, May 25th at 4:36 PM PST, the Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled to land on the far northern arctic tundra of Mars. The lander is tasked with finding and analyzing water ice which the Mars Orbiter has detected just under the surface.
This follows the loss of the Mars Polar Lander, whose landing thrusters failed 40 meters above the surface, and the Mars Climate Orbiter, which either crashed near the Martian south pole on September 23, 1999, or skipped off the atmosphere and went into orbit around the Sun.
The problem on the Orbiter was traced to a disparity between contractor Lockheed Martin, which used English units for the navigation controls, while NASA has been using the metric system since 1990. That was the official announcement, although it seems like something so obvious should have been caught earlier. Perhaps the problem wasn’t considered until the crucial last minutes of the mission. The Wikipedia entry seems to be clear on this:
The problem arose partly because the software had been adapted from use on the earlier Mars Climate Orbiter, without proper testing before launch, and partly because the navigation data provided by this software was not cross-checked while in flight.
On August 22, 1993, the first Mars Observer was also lost while in the final stages of its approach to the planet. The popular theory is that the Observer lost pressurization in its fuel tanks, sending it spinning out of control.
One of the last images sent from the doomed Russian Phobos II Mars Mission in 1989 showed an anomalous object that was quickly seized upon by some observers as some kind of alien probe sent to destroy the spacecraft. It could as easily have been a piece of rock or debris which was blurred by the camera.
Mars’ moon Phobos and anomalous “probe” - Last image sent from Phobos II
We’ll see what happens on Sunday. Official JPL link here.
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May 21 2008 
May 21st, 2008 at 10:10 am
I think you’re confusing Mars polar Lander with Mars Climate Orbiter, which is the mission that had the Newtons/pounds conversion SNAFU (which in my view should be laid squarely at the feet of the JPL nav team).
Mars Polar Lander crashed, but it was a combination of a glitchy landing leg switch, a software bug, and an inadequate test program driven by short schedule and tiny budget.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:33 am
Hmmm… I think disownedsky is right, Greg.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:04 am
This is what I get for multitasking late at night.
Thanks for the correction!
May 21st, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Live? Didn’t NASA initiate delays in their live feeds to as much as 40 minutes so that they could airbrush and/or photoshop anomolous images out such as alien craft, aliens, Marvin, etc.? Methinks the only real live feeds are shuttle take-offs and landings. Anyone remember this?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Well, there’s also another good cause for the delays NightFlight: the distance between Earth & Mars (100 million kilometers when they are closest).