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: 10256 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_* |
Mar 18 2006, 12:19 AM
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Guests |
It was for me, too. Although I was already interested in science, it was the news in a Sept. 1964 issue of "My Weekly Reader" that there were two Mariners scheduled to go to Mars (which I hadn't known, although I already knew about the Rangers and the 1962 Mariners) that turned my tentative interest in Solar System exploration into a flat-out obsession.
By the way, Harry Turtledove -- who specializes in alternate history (he's just finishing up Vol. 10 of his grisly history of the world if the South had won the Civil War) -- wrote a novel called "A World of Difference" back around 1990 on how things would have turned out if everything had been just as it actually is except that Mars was Earth-sized and therefore capable of holding a CO2 atmosphere dense enough to keep it habitable despite its distance from the Sun, and the last photo from Viking 1 had shown an indignant native advancing on it with a club. Plausibly but depressingly, the US and the Soviets would immediately have started trying to convert the Martians to their particular ideologies. (Since such a planet would have been dazzlingly bright white rather than red, it would have been called "Minerva".) P.S.: I admire the hell out of Barton's considerably grimmer and more likely alternate history story "Age of Aquarius", on what the Sixties would have been like if the Cuban Missile Crisis had turned out just a wee bit differently. |
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Mar 18 2006, 01:09 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 114 Joined: 6-November 05 From: So. Maryland, USA Member No.: 544 |
P.S.: I admire the hell out of Barton's considerably grimmer and more likely alternate history story "Age of Aquarius", on what the Sixties would have been like if the Cuban Missile Crisis had turned out just a wee bit differently. I do too, and I'm a character in it. It's a shame it hasn't been reprinted. Did you catch his alternate lunar program story "Harvest Moon" in Asimov's last year? Michael |
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