Shortly afterwards, Mars Global Surveyor arrived, and the modern era of Martian exploration began.
Already in place is the Mars Global Surveyor, which has been circling the planet for several years.
Before Mars Global Surveyor, red planet researchers relied on Viking data from the 1970s, which yielded much lower resolution images.
Nasa's efforts to locate MPL are continuing with cameras on board the orbiting probe Mars Global Surveyor scanning the planet's surface.
The Mars Global Surveyor is currently in a polar orbit, giving its onboard camera a good view as the frost sublimed.
Since it started its mapping mission around Mars in 1998, the Mars Global Surveyor has sent back thousands of high quality images.
Malin is the principal investigator for the camera onboard Mars Global Surveyor, currently in its fifth month of mapping the red planet.
The cost of the Mars Global Surveyor probe was roughly 200 million USD for the satellite and launch, plus 20 million per year.
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The elevation measurements were collected by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), an instrument aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, during the spring and summer of 1998.
The seasonal change releases the ice directly into the atmosphere, a process known as sublimation, according to NASA, which described the images on its Mars Global Surveyor Web site.
The Mars Global Surveyor, which mapped the Red Planet from the late 90s, and the Near-Shoemaker probe, which visited an Asteroid Eros in 2003, both carried the Westcott technology.
Now, using a camera onboard an orbiting probe called Mars Global Surveyor, scientists think they may have spotted something on the surface of Mars that is a good candidate for the remains of this NASA craft.
Images taken by the orbiting NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft enabled scientists to detect changes in the walls of two craters in the southern hemisphere of Mars, apparently caused by the downhill flow of water in the past few years.
While we've no idea how much the Mars Global Surveyor actually cost to construct, launch, and manage whilst hovering around in space, it's entirely likely that a single human error wiped out even more than was initially lost by the Alaska Department of Revenue earlier this year.
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Researchers in the field, such as Ernest Robinson, the head of the Aerospace Corporation's picosatellite project, dream of a day when swarms of nanosatellites (weighing less than 10kg) and picosatellites (weighing less than 1kg) might be used to establish a global navigation and communications network around Mars.
Just as Mars -- a desert planet -- gives us insights into global climate change on Earth, the promise awaits for bringing back to life portions of the Red Planet through the application of Earth Science to its similar chemistry, possibly reawakening its life-bearing potential.
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