Mariner Mars 1964, Mariners 3 and 4 to Mars: imaging plans? |
Mariner Mars 1964, Mariners 3 and 4 to Mars: imaging plans? |
Apr 28 2005, 05:05 PM
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Solar System Cartographer Group: Members Posts: 10229 Joined: 5-April 05 From: Canada Member No.: 227 |
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 -------------------- ... because the Solar System ain't gonna map itself.
Also to be found posting similar content on https://mastodon.social/@PhilStooke Maps for download (free PDF: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...Cartography.pdf NOTE: everything created by me which I post on UMSF is considered to be in the public domain (NOT CC, public domain) |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Nov 29 2005, 08:07 AM
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Guests |
Yeah, I've got the full dibs on the process by which Mariner 5's science payload was selected. And I knew about the 1964 problems with the Mariner Mars UV photometer all the way back in 1964, nyahh nyahh! (It was only some time later that they decided to add the radio occultation experiment, which as things turned out told us a lot more about Mars.)
The problem with Mariner 5 is that they decided to fly it literally at the last minute -- Dec. 1965 -- and there was simply no time to develop some of the experiments they would have liked most to include, such as UV or IR spectrometers. (In fact, the radio occultation experiment was officially ranked as the most important one!) But they did come fairly close to adding an Earth-occultation photometer that could have told us what the cloud-top altitude was, which makes me wonder whether it might have clued us in to the clouds being sulfuric acid -- which instead wasn't discovered until 1973. By the way, I first learned about the cancelled 1959 Venus orbiter back in 1965. The Space History Geek Knows All! (Or would like to think so.) |
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