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The Viking Lander 2 Landing Site - Gerald Soffen Memorial Station (ctx frame - Natural Colors; credits: Lunar Explorer Italia)
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Viking Lander 2 (VL2) landed on Mars on 3 September 1976, in Utopia Planitia. The Lander, which has a diameter of about 3 meters, has been precisely located in the HiRISE image, and likely locations have been found for the Heat-Shield and Backshell.
The Lander location has been confirmed by overlaying the lander-derived topographic contours on the HiRISE image, which provides an excellent match.
VL2 was one element of an ambitious mission to study Mars, with a 4-spacecraft flotilla consisting of 2 Orbiters and 2 Landers.
Large Boulders, Dunes and other features visible in Lander images can be located in the HiRISE image. The polygonal pattern of the Surface is typical at these latitudes and may be due to the presence of deep subsurface ice.
As chance would have it, this image is blurred in some places due to the abrupt motion associated with the restart of the High Gain Antenna tracking during the very short image exposure. This is the first time after acquiring hundreds of pictures that an image has been unintentionally smeared, but the overall performance has been excellent.
A prime motivation for early viewing of these Viking sites is to calibrate what we see from space with the data previously acquired by the Landers. In particular, determining what sizes of rocks can be seen from MRO aids the interpretation of data now being taken to characterize sites for future landers.
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