And I thought it was pretty convincing! Of course, as any good scientist, Alexander Tikhonovich remained skeptical, and always referred to these in his correspondence as "elements of Mars-3, as seen by Vitaliy." But he wrote the head of the HiRISE team, Alfred McEwen.

The American response was swift and unexpected for me: "We will re-image this location to see if we can learn more."

That's it! I do not know whether my illustrations were so convincing, or international authority of Basilevsky is so high; NASA agreed to direct their Mars orbiter to search in a place where something seemed interesting to a boy from Soviet Russia.

[I know that it's not really either. HiRISE has a fantastic program called HiWish that allows anyone to suggest imaging targets. Anyone, either professional or enthusiast, American or not, can suggest a spot, if they give a good explanation why it should be imaged. I've written about it before, on more than one occasion. So has Alfred. Alfred has expressed to me repeatedly that he is surprised by how few people take advantage of HiWish to image any spot on Mars. Obviously when you ask for an image through HiWish you are not guaranteed to get your photo. But in my experience, if there is even a halfway decent justification -- and Vitaliy's request more than achieves that standard -- the HiRISE team will work to get your image taken. Now, the HiRISE team does receive a lot of suggestions for imaging possible crashed hardware, and perhaps Vitaliy's suggestion would have been lost in the mess of suggestions that have much poorer justification. In that case, personal contact with someone on the HiRISE team may have been necessary, and it sure didn't hurt to have Sasha Basilevsky sending that email. But the point remains that if you can show you have done your homework, it doesn't matter who you are, you can request and probably eventually receive a HiRISE image. I have talked with Mars scientists at conferences who were unaware of HiWish and who expressed shock when I told them that all they had to do to get a HiRISE photo of a desirable target was to request an image through HiWish. I am not sure what more the HiRISE team can do to get the word out about this program! Anyway, enough ranting, back to the story.]

While NASA aimed their orbiter, Basilevsky shared my discovery with Arnold Selivanov, chief of the scientific and technical center for Russian Space Systems, Ltd., and one of the builders of Mars-3. He also quickly overcame his initial skepticism and made efforts to double-check the information on their behalf. It was necessary to determine the length of the cable on the notorious soft-landing engine. To do this, they had to make their way into the bowels of NPO Lavochkin. Selivanov gave this task to an NGO engineer, Vladimir Molodtsov.

For me, there was a lull: HiRISE crisscrossing the Martian space, Vladimir searching NPO Lavochkin space.

Trying to extract some information from the available photos, I measured the height of the proposed unit, from the length of the shadow and illumination angle. I got 78 centimeters. The height of the real Mars-3: 75 centimeters (ratio of height to width in the half-unfolded state). A little positive argument, but the main evidence would have to wait.

Weeks passed. April approached.

The first news came from our side, from Vladimir: "The chains connecting the solid rocket motor soft landing with parachute container have a length of 4.52 meters."

Bingo! On Mars it was 4.8; 4.5 in the engineering drawings. The precision was within 1.5 pixel. The more visible 0.3 meter-tall-object connected to it was just right to match the height of the engine. It was just a great gift. We hurried to share it with the Americans, and in return received no-less-positive news: "We have a new image and are working on special noise removal and sharpening of both images."

After a few days, they sent the finished result: