Have you seen this lander?

In what's rapidly turning into 'Lost Spacecraft Week' here at the OxSciBlog, NASA have put out a call for volunteers to help find a missing Mars probe.

Mars Polar Lander was lost on 3 December 1999. Now, in a move reminiscent of both Oxford's Galaxy Zoo project and the search for missing aviator Steve Fossett, NASA want members of the public to scan images taken by the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter for signs of the lost craft.

The catch? Whilst there are only 18 images to look through, each of them contains around 1.6 billion pixels and scientists don't know exactly what the lander will look like after impact and eight years of weathering. Even if its parachute deployed and is visible the entire spacecraft is likely to be only a few pixels across. Just to make things more interesting the crash site has a speckled appearance, making detecting a small object even more difficult.

Then there's the question of dust: I've blogged about dust on Mars before - dunes of dust form the same shapes on Mars as they do in Earth's deserts. Could they have swallowed up or worn away MPL? Only time, and the work of avid lander-hunters, is likely to tell.

Image: Mars Polar Lander. Credit: NASA/JPL. 

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