Mariner 4 Alternate Universe, What if...? |
Mariner 4 Alternate Universe, What if...? |
Sep 29 2006, 11:01 PM
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8784 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
What if Mariner 4's flyby had occurred right across Tharsis & Coprates Chasma, showing volcanoes & canyons instead of heavily cratered terrain? (I understand that trajectory determinants prevented this from happening, of course, but still...). Do you suppose that Mars exploration would have been thrown into hyperdrive during the heady '60s, perhaps enough to sustain manned efforts beyond Apollo?
Doug, my apologies if this is OT for this section...there seem to be some interesting implications here for the imaginative, though. -------------------- A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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Guest_DonPMitchell_* |
Oct 1 2006, 07:15 AM
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Guests |
I'll take a stab at that simulation, but this is just scaled to match the Mariner-4 camera, and eyeballing the noise levels in actual Mariner-4 images:
[attachment=7819:attachment] [attachment=7820:attachment] Mariner-4 (Actual) Valles Marinaris (Simulated) It's tricker to know what Mars-1 would have seen. The Mars-1 camera was built by the same people who did Zond-3's, but it was in some respects better than the Zond-3 camera. It just weighed too much, because it used 70mm film. [attachment=7821:attachment] Here's an actual Mars-4 image. Mars-1 would have sent back an image of this resolution. Their Mars-1 telemetry system for images used orthogonal coding in the signal (in fact, pulse-position modulation). |
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