Can we find the Mars 6 Lander?

[Minmus Taster]

I've been wondering if it would be possible to locate the Soviet Mars 6 Lander on the Martian surface. A similar feat was accomplished around a decade ago when civilians discovered a likely candidate for the Mars 3 hardware.

The fate of the Mars 6 Lander remains unknown to this day. Its parachute had deployed and everything seemed to be going as planned until contact was lost and never regained around the time the probe was supposed to make contact with the surface. Due to a fault in its computers most of the atmospheric data being transmitted was also useless.  It's not known if the Lander made it to the ground intact or if it was destroyed, hopefully this can change soon. I'm looking for people who would be willing to take some time out of their day looking through MRO images to try and locate the Lander. The general location the probe was heading is known and a likely landing area was shared years ago but this will still be a difficult search with a good chance of turning up nothing.  Nonetheless I thought it would be a fun community project if nothing else. If no one is able to assist in the search it would still be greatly appreciated if someone could explain to me how to access and look through MRO images in this area.

[cubinator]

https://ode.rsl.wustl.edu/mars/mapsearch

This should help. You can search for data products by instrument and location. I guess the HiRISE images would be the main ones to look through?

https://www.uahirise.org/ESP_056982_1560

[DDE]

ZelenyiKot, the person behind the original Mars-3 search, had already petitioned and received likely landing area shots from HiRise a decade ago - see closer to bottom of the article:

https://habr.com/ru/articles/215433

Alternative link:

https://zelenyikot.livejournal.com/59495.html?view=11136871

In 2018, they identified a likely crater:

https://ria.ru/20180720/1524981234.html

I haven't been able to dig up the coordinates just yet, but they shouldn't be too difficult to acquire - the claimant is Anton Gromov, Russia's Musketeer-in-chief, Russian SpaceX livestream commenter and the ballistician/astrogator for Bureau 1440.

[Minmus Taster]

18 minutes ago, DDE said:

ZelenyiKot, the person behind the original Mars-3 search, had already petitioned and received likely landing area shots from HiRise a decade ago - see closer to bottom of the article:

https://habr.com/ru/articles/215433

Alternative link:

https://zelenyikot.livejournal.com/59495.html?view=11136871

In 2018, they identified a likely crater:

https://ria.ru/20180720/1524981234.html

I haven't been able to dig up the coordinates just yet, but they shouldn't be too difficult to acquire - the claimant is Anton Gromov, Russia's Musketeer-in-chief, Russian SpaceX livestream commenter and the ballistician/astrogator for Bureau 1440.

Very interesting, though it seems that none of the links provided loaded properly. Are there any other sources you are aware of?

[mikegarrison]

They should just turn on the debris filter in map mode, and that would find it right away.

[Minmus Taster]

4 hours ago, DDE said:

Image seems to be working now, interesting, it really doesn't look like a proper crash site to me. What I see is a crater, a bright spherical object (probably the lander) and some other debris. Assuming this is in fact Mars 6 is it possible it hard-landed but just slow enough for the probe's structure to remain intact? It was designed to be dropped after all. We'd also need to look at the general area for signs of the heatshield and parachute since the lander had already jettisoned those, which would require re-finding the candidate object.

[DDE]

51 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:

Image seems to be working now, interesting, it really doesn't look like a proper crash site to me. What I see is a crater, a bright spherical object (probably the lander) and some other debris. Assuming this is in fact Mars 6 is it possible it hard-landed but just slow enough for the probe's structure to remain intact? It was designed to be dropped after all.

They ordered a simulation of the impact at 60 m/s at a 10-degree angle from vertical and it returned a 3.5-5.5 m crater and a bounce of over 99 m.

https://multiphysics.ru/stati/proekty/modelirovanie-padeniia-spuskaemogo-apparata-mars-6.htm

And that article finally yielded a link to this HiRise strip:

https://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_003894_1560

Doing a quick search for similarly overtly labelled images - there's a dozen - revealed a 2018 one that seems particularly certain in its titling

https://www.uahirise.org/ESP_056982_1560

Also, this guy seems to have done the legwork to identify the exact spot

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=743e5ba2d3deef65dad1ef842b08b628&showtopic=8399&view=findpost&p=240470

P.S. The search project involved the poor guys from Dauria Aerospace...

Edited April 30 by DDE

[Minmus Taster]

59 minutes ago, DDE said:

They ordered a simulation of the impact at 60 m/s at a 10-degree angle from vertical and it returned a 3.5-5.5 m crater and a bounce of over 99 m.

https://multiphysics.ru/stati/proekty/modelirovanie-padeniia-spuskaemogo-apparata-mars-6.htm

And that article finally yielded a link to this HiRise strip:

https://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_003894_1560

Doing a quick search for similarly overtly labelled images - there's a dozen - revealed a 2018 one that seems particularly certain in its titling

https://www.uahirise.org/ESP_056982_1560

Also, this guy seems to have done the legwork to identify the exact spot

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?s=743e5ba2d3deef65dad1ef842b08b628&showtopic=8399&view=findpost&p=240470

P.S. The search project involved the poor guys from Dauria Aerospace...

Created some basic graphs based on the information from the linked forum showing the exact location of the candidate site:

Spoiler

Valles Marineris takes up the left of the image, the pink spots represent some images areas. The red square is the landing area.

Now inside the likely landing area. The location of the candidate is just north of the center of the predicted area.

The collage which the candidate was located in. It's on the right edge of the image near the bottom. Just to the East-South-East of a small crater.

The possible crash site.