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A group of Russian space enthusiasts may have found the location of the first space probe ever to land on Mars, the 42-year-old Mars-3. 

In a post Thursday, NASA highlighted pictures taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter near the location of the Curiosity rover. 

“In 1971, the former Soviet Union launched the Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions to Mars.  Each consisted of an orbiter plus a lander,” NASA said. “ Both orbiter missions succeeded, although the surface of Mars was obscured by a planet-encircling dust storm.  The Mars 2 lander crashed.  Mars 3 became the first successful soft landing on the Red Planet, but stopped transmitting after just 14.5 seconds for unknown reasons.” 

The Russian group, which comes together online as a Mars Curiosity Rover community, started searching through images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  Through crowdsourcing, it wasn’t long until they found something. 

Vitali Egorov, the head of the community, “modelled what Mars 3 hardware pieces should look like in a HiRISE image, and the group carefully searched the many small features in this large image, finding what appear to be viable candidates in the southern part of the scene,” NASA said. “ Each candidate has a size and shape consistent with the expected hardware, and they are arranged on the surface as expected from the entry, descent and landing sequence.”