A US spy mapping agency said today it may have found the remains of NASA's Mars Polar Lander craft, which lost contact with earthly controllers in 1999 as it prepared to land on Mars.
The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), a part of the Defense Department which usually makes maps and takes images of Earth for intelligence, military and humanitarian purposes, used pictures made by a NASA satellite orbiting Mars to track down what could be the doomed polar lander.
NIMA gave NASA an unclassified report which said NIMA believed it had located the Mars Polar Lander, the mapping agency said in a statement. The two agencies are working with this report to resolve a number of technical questions.
"We still don't know what this new research by NIMA shows," Mr Don Savage, a spokesman for NASA's space science office, said.
Mr Savage said there will probably be an interim statement in a few days. He confirmed the NIMA analysis was focusing on the area where the planned landing was to have occurred, around the Martian south pole.
The lander was one of two unstaffed Mars probes that were lost in 1999. In the lander's case, ground controllers knew it arrived at Mars on December 3, 1999, but it never transmitted any data back to Earth as planned.
Contact was never reestablished and after a series of efforts to communicate with the lander, it was deemed a total loss by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Jan. 17, 2000.