14 DAY TRIAL // Following their analyzing several pictures taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter back in 2007, a team of Russian amateur astronomers claim to have discovered the resting place of a Soviet Mars lander that went missing in 1971, shortly after having landed on the Red Planet.
By the looks of it, the four Mars 4 pieces of hardware that these amateurs managed to spot while looking at 5-year-old photographs are as follows: the parachute, the heat shield, the terminal retrorocket and the lander.
“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,” argued HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen.
“Further analysis of the data and future images to better understand the three-dimensional shapes may help to confirm this interpretation,” Alfred McEwen later added.
Despite its being the first spacecraft to successfully land on this planet and even succeed in transmitting for a very short while, the Mars 3 lost contact to Earth in a matter of seconds.