http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/space/20010319/sc/exclusive_spy_agency_may_have_located_mars_polar_lander_1.html

Last night, on the Art Bell radio show, Coast to Coast,
Richard C. Hoagland discussed the following exciting
information about the Mars Polar Lander being located
by an exclusive agency!

Science - SPACE.com - updated 10:45 AM ET Mar 20

Reuters | SPACE.com | AP

Monday March 19 07:30 PM EST

EXCLUSIVE: Spy Agency May Have Located Mars Polar Lander

By Leonard David
Senior Space Writer, SPACE.com

WASHINGTON – The Mars Polar Lander may have been found
-- intact -- by a top-secret spy imagery agency.

The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) has
been quietly scanning Mars pictures, looking for the
Mars Polar Lander since early December 1999. According
to a source close to the NIMA effort, photographic
specialists at NIMA think they’ve spotted something.
But NASA officials say it’s too early to tell.

The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) dove into the Martian
atmosphere on Dec. 3, 1999, heading for a soft landing
on the planet's south polar region. But contact was
never reestablished after the probe was to have
touched down. On Jan. 17, 2000, after a series of
efforts to communicate with the spacecraft failed, the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who managed the mission,
declared it a loss.

NIMA contacted NASA within a few weeks of the lander's
failure, said Edward Weiler, head of NASA’s Office of
Space Science.

NIMA on patrol

NIMA is a combat support agency of the Department of
Defense. The agency has a global mission and unique
responsibilities to manage and provide imagery and
geo-spatial information to national policymakers and
military forces.

A world-class leader in imagery intelligence, NIMA
routinely supports the operations of top-secret U.S.
national security spacecraft. They employ specialists
in maximizing information that can be gleaned from
surveillance photography.

"Shortly after the loss of Mars Polar Lander, NIMA and
NASA began working together analyzing images of the
intended landing site and to try to locate the
spacecraft," said Jennifer Lafley, a NIMA spokeswoman.

"At this point, the results of this study are not
conclusive, and the agencies are working together on
resolving a number of technical questions," Lafley
said.

On the surface

According to a SPACE.com source familiar with the
search underway, euphoric NIMA experts believe they
have identified the Mars Polar Lander. Furthermore,
the source said that the lander appears intact on the
surface, sitting atop its trio of landing legs. If so,
that finding calls to question a failure review board
that cited a software glitch and inadequate testing
procedures as a likely cause for the probe to smack
into Mars’ surface at high speed.

In the past, searches of images relayed by Mars Global
Surveyor – still operating around the Red Planet –
failed to find the craft itself, its reentry
aeroshell, or the vehicle’s parachute.

"If found intact, it would mean that we would have to
reexamine our most probable cause of failure," said
Noel Hinners, on special assignment for Lockheed
Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado. The aerospace
firm built the Mars Polar Lander for NASA.

While not aware of any spotting of the lander by NIMA
teams, Hinners said finding the lander perched on the
Martian terrain would be welcome news. It would
certainly call into question whether the right
probable cause was identified as to why Mars Polar
Lander disappeared, he said.

"It would also tell me that the 2001 lander that we
built and have at the company is perfectly good. We
think that anyway…so why not use that asset?" Hinners
told SPACE.com. "If it should turn up someplace, we
need to go back and make sure that the communications
systems and the reconnaissance are such that we can
find things better than we did this time around," he
said.

Too early to tell

Weiler said it’s too soon to declare any victory about
finding the Mars Polar Lander.

"It’s no big secret. They have a lot of expertise in
analyzing imagery. They said they would be willing to
put some of their best people to spend some spare time
on a fun project. They wanted to see if they could
pull an image ‘out of the grass,’ so to speak, of
looking at Mars Global Surveyor data to search for the
Mars Polar Lander," Weiler told SPACE.com.

Weiler said NIMA experts have been searching for the
probe for some 14 to 15 months. "They’ve got some
initial data. We’ve looked at it and we’ve agreed
there’s some technical issues on whether there’s
anything there or not," he said.

"We are a couple to several months away from resolving
each other's questions and coming to a joint
conclusion. We will do this together -- NIMA and
NASA," Weiler said.

"If anybody is saying that they have definitively
proved to [the] 99 percentile that Mars Polar Lander
has or hasn’t been found, they are overstating the
situation grossly," Weiler said.

Lafley of NIMA said that when the agencies arrive at
firm conclusions, they would make a joint
announcement. "In any event, additional images of the
intended MPL landing site will be acquired using the
Mars Global Surveyor orbiter later this year," she
said.

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