Amateurs Find Mars Lander Lost 42 Years Ago

The Mars 3, a Soviet lander, went missing back in 1971 after performing the first soft landing on Mars. It operated for 15 seconds, failed, and eventually came to rest ... somewhere. The exact location was unknown, thanks to radio communications that were disabled, possibly thanks to a dust storm. But a team of amateur researchers may have found the lander, Scientific American reports. They studied images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, taken in 2007, and spotted something that could be the Mars 3—plus objects that could be its descent module, heat shield, and the parachute, all nearby and in the expected landing area inside Ptolemaeus Crater.

Another photo of the same area on the Red Planet's surface, taken by the NASA orbiter in March, backs up the Russian team's case, but they'll continue studying the pictures to confirm the finding. It's the first visible evidence of the lander in 41 years, Discovery News reports. The team of researchers was "crowdsourced" on the Internet in a campaign organized by Russian space enthusiasts. The founder of the group made scale models of the Mars 3 hardware, then looked through the images for features that matched. “Together, this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match, but alternative explanations cannot be ruled out,” he says. (More Mars stories.)