Mariner Mars 1964, Mariners 3 and 4 to Mars: imaging plans? Options

[Phil Stooke]

I am currently working on a book about lunar exploration, but looking ahead to the next one, which will cover Mars. One question to which I think I have an answer - but I'd like to see what my fellow Mars enthusiasts think - is this:

Mariner 3 failed to leave Earth. But if it had flown successfully, what area on Mars would it have photographed?

My understanding is that there was no specific plan. The MM64 press kit, for instance, says nothing about image coverage for either Mariner 3 or Mariner 4. I believe that navigation to planetary distances was still so uncertain that the flight team could not predict at launch the sub-spacecraft point at closest approach - uncertainties included the exact time of the flyby, the distance and the point at which the spacecraft would pass through the target plane. These things would be known closer to the flyby but they weren't precisely predictable at launch, so Mariner 3 never got to the stage of having an imaging plan.

Am I right?

Phil

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Try the combination of "Venus" and "Atlas-Able" on Google. I did just now and found a few new tidbits -- including one article ( http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:Lt4FgV9...e%22+arpa&hl=en ) that goes into a bit more detail about just how NASA initially embraced this thing (apparently it started out as the Air Force's planned successor to its unsuccessful 1958 Pioneer lunar orbiters), and one German author ( http://www.bernd-leitenberger.de/pioneer-p.html ) who's dug up the precise cause of that static-firing Atlas explosion.

However, LePage's article says that NASA decided to cancel the Venus orbiter (though not the Pioneer 5 Venus flyby) very early in 1959, which directly clashes with that NY Times article and my other sources. And the German's got the failure causes of the remaining three flights mixed up -- his very last paragraph records the true cause of the Nov. 1959 failure while mixing it up with the Dec. 1960 failure, and he falsely says that the Nov. 1959 failure had a similar cause to the Sept. 1960 one, having clearly instead printed two accounts of the latter that differ slightly in their phrasing.