Our next question comes from Juan from Gijon and he says hello, and he asks: How, have you considered taking pictures of the pathfinder Viking and MER landing sites? What about lost Martian probes like the Polar, Mars Polar Lander, or Beagle-2? Yeah. We can't wait to look at the landing sites with our resolution instruments. It will be, you know, very exciting to look at the surface and see tracks of the rovers and be able to, it actually provides very important data both for understanding the landing sites and for us because the rovers have been on the surface and looking close-up with a whole suite of instruments. And that helps give us what we call ground truth. It tells us, okay, these are really the minerals that are in this very local area. So when we look at our, at these landing sites with our instruments, that gives us a data point to use to help calibrate what we're seeing. So it helps us improve our science and it helps them by providing additional information with their landing sites. And in terms of the other spacecraft, yes, we'll certainly try to use our camera to look for other landers that are on the surface. We, you know, given the resolution of our cameras and the size of the spacecraft, we certainly anticipate being able to locate them. Even Beagle, which is a very small lander, smaller than we can actually see, we hope to be able to see their parachute, which would be much larger and give us a big target to look at.
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NASA ID
ksc_080805_mro_smrekar9
Date Created
August 18, 2005
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KSC
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video
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NASA or National Aeronautics and Space Administration
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