The Cydonia Update / November 16, 1997
Exploring the New Millennium from a Christian Perspective
Written by Joe Schembrie. Copyright 1997 Cydonia Books,Inc.
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"There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars." (Luke 21:25)

One-Year Glitch in Face on Mars

Mars Global Surveyor, launched in 1996 with high hopes to rephotograph the Face on Mars at much higher resolution than ever before, perhaps finally resolving the entire issue, has now run into a glitch that will delay its planetary surface mapping mission for at least one year. A fracture in the yoke between the space probe and one of its solar panels is affecting the way that MGS decelerates during the atmosphere-grazing low-points of its orbits around Mars. Now the probe can't go as deep into the atmosphere, or decelerate as quickly. It will take a year longer for the probe to position itself into its intended mapping orbit.

"Essentially, we will begin mapping the surface of Mars in mid-March 1999, during summer in the northern hemisphere," said project manager Glenn Cunningham during a press conference held at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California last Tuesday. "Originally, we had planned to begin mapping on March 15, 1998."

Cunningham sees a silver lining: "The bottom line message is that this is actually a far better mission than our original mission. The happenstance of the broken yoke has led us down a path we never expected. It's an unexpected bonus."

Talk about your basic spin-doctoring. Like a political candidate's handlers trying to explain away his dipping public opinion poll figures, NASA is obviously trying to put a happy face on a serious mission problem. Actually, except that it will provide a year's more steady employment for NASA scientists, the glitch is a sad loss to the American taxpayer and science in general. The mission will be delayed a whole year, the cost will increase by millions of dollars, and the mapping mission will be shortened from a full- year to just nine months. And what of that stone face waiting patiently at Cydonia?

NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, in a speech given at the Freedom Foundation in New York last year, said that Mars Global Surveyor would photograph the Face on Mars if it could:

    There are some people who believe that there is a Face on Mars. There were pictures taken from some Viking spacecraft, and if you look at the right kind of shadows you could imagine that there is a Face on Mars. Now there's two ways that NASA could approach this: one, we could say: 'You don't know what you're talking about; we know that there couldn't be a civilization on Mars, and therefore we'll never take a picture of that spot.' But, there are taxpayers who believe this. So one of the things we are going to do on our next mission is when the spacecraft goes over that spot, if we have the right pointing, we'll try and take a picture, and scientifically show what we have found.

Ha, said Richard Hoagland, the leader of the Enterprise mission, who is hostile toward NASA in that he believes the space agency is concealing the truth about life on Mars because it is concerned that the public will panic if they learn the truth. Hoagland's conspiracy theory looks pretty strong right now.

In Chapter 7 of my web-book, A Hill on Mars, I wrote about the last time NASA sent a probe to Mars. It was called Mars Observer:

    That billion-dollar space probe, launched by NASA in September 1992, was a long-overdue return to the planet. Despite record-high budgets, NASA had not sent a single space probe to Mars for seventeen long years. By that time, public calls had grown for rephotographing the Cydonia Complex.

    However, NASA had gone out of its way to stymie that objective.

    The original design of the Mars Observer probe actually omitted a high-resolution camera. It would analyze the atmosphere with various sensors, and scan the terrain with radar, but its low resolution camera would see the Cydonia monuments merely as featureless specks! Michael Carr, former head of the Viking Imaging Team, expressed the NASA sentiment: "We have enough pictures of Mars."

    Congress disagreed; people like to see pictures, and so a high-resolution camera was added to the probe. However, breaking with space probe tradition, Mars Observer's high- resolution camera was fixed rather than swivel mounted. The camera couldn't be accurately aimed at anything -- let alone Cydonia!

    "Despite the resolving power of Mars Observer's narrow-angle camera, it may not be able to photograph the so-called 'face,'" wrote Diane Ainsworth, a senior staff writer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an article published just prior to the launch of the space probe. She continues:

      The narrow-angle camera cannot be pointed precisely at targets of interest -- the camera is fixed to the bottom of the spacecraft to point only at the surface that lies directly below. Taking a picture of a specific site with this camera requires waiting weeks or months for the orbit of Mars Observer to carry it over the site and then starting an exposure at the right time, with the hope that the calculations of the spacecraft position and target location were good enough that your target ended up in the camera's very narrow field of view during the exposure. Because of this hit-or-miss framing, Mars Observer may never get a close-up shot of the geologic feature.

    Some reasons why the Mars Observer camera couldn't photograph the Face were: (1) limited field of view, (2) limited size of data buffer, (3) pointing control instability, (4) spacecraft position uncertainty, (5) non-inertial position uncertainty, and (6) orbital spacing. Mike Malin, the Principal Investigator of the Mars Observer Camera, sums up what he calls the bottom line on rephotographing the Face: "We will try. We more than likely will not succeed."

    Mars Observer was unique in another way. NASA had always sent probes to Mars as twins: Mariners 3 & 4 in 1965, Mariners 6 & 7 in 1969, Mariners 8 & 9 in 1971, and Vikings 1 & 2 in 1976. Yet Mars Observer had no backup.

    The Soviets had sent fifteen probes to Mars and all had failed. The US had sent eight, and two had failed. Backups were necessary, and Mars Observer was due.

    And Mars Observer did fail. Just prior to orbital insertion, on August 21, 1993, the probe's radio was shut down to conserve energy during a fuel tank pressurization procedure. Contact was never regained. Mars Observer might be circling Mars right now, in perfect working order save for a defective transistor in its electronic clock. Or it failed to decelerate into Mars orbit, and now circles the Sun. Or it exploded into a million pieces.

Mars Global Surveyor isn't out of it yet. But pessimism ensues. Perhaps this is not the millennium when the truth about the Face is to be revealed -- if it is ever to be revealed by a spacecraft sent by NASA.


(Note: The Cydonia Update returns to a monthly schedule. Next edition will be in December).


[ A Hill on Mars: Evidence for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ]


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