Mariner 4 Alternate Universe, What if...? Options

[nprev]

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.

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

What if Mars-1 had worked and returned 1440 x 1440 pixel images of Mars in 1962?

I don't think better pictures would have prompted a manned landing attempt though. The Apollo program was already incredibly expensive, and going to Mars would have cost several times more.

[Guest_Myran_*]

Even worse, if von Brauns vision actually had been realized. Its likely that one attempt to land humans on Mars would have become a catastrophic failure. There's several reasons for that, breakdown of machinery are one, but the most important are the severe medical problems related to long time exposure to weightlessness are that of long-term radiation exposure, neither well known back then but that have been indentified since. Yes identified only, no true counter are found for either.

Some of those have been mentioned here in the manned spaceflight subforum to mention one thread.

So if one attempt have been made, even without a truly catastrophic end, it might have have far reaching consequences with a situation where astronauts reached the orbit of Mars but unable to land, or even worse, actually reach the surface but unable to perform any meaningful exploration.

The result could have been a blow to space exploration as a whole, that I feel secure in saying it is best that it never was attempted. So overall I do think it was for the best to go with this unmanned strategy as we have done in the real world.

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Well I've been told to shut up whenever I've said this before (not that that means much to me), but I think long-term human habitation of Mars requires some careful strategic thinking that is pretty much absent from current space programs. Instead of making real progress with a series of automatic probes, laboratories and factories, the emphasis has been on expensive high-propaganda-value missions that are basically one-shot deals. Like Apollo, you spend a fortune landing a man somewhere remote, by the fastest means possible, and after the media event is over there is nothing lasting to show for it.

[centsworth_II]

Like Apollo, you spend a fortune landing a man somewhere remote, by the fastest means possible, and after the media event is over there is nothing lasting to show for it.

Nothing lasting in terms of manned flight, but do you not think the science from the returned moonrocks and other experiments was a worthwhile lasting contribution?

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Nothing lasting in terms of manned flight, but do you not think the science from the returned moonrocks and other experiments was a worthwhile lasting contribution?

I'm not sure that's the right question to ask. Were the Moon rocks worth $135 billion? Of course not. We could have gotten Moon rocks like the Soviets did for one percent of that cost. I think the actual and intended benefits of Apollo were:

1. Mobilize Americans to become scientists and engineers

2. Demonstrate the superiority of capitalism over socialism

3. Economically stimulate high-technology industry

4. Boost national morale

I'd love to see that kind of national mobilization happen again, but I don't think repeating the exact same program would have those benefits today. Thomas Friedmann has suggested that American energy independence would be a good program. Who knows?

[dvandorn]

Here's an attempt to hijack the thread and keep it from devolving in to the argument Doug says *will not* happen here:

If we're talking about "what-if" scenarios, and we can change bigger factors, then I'd say the only thing that would have caused an immediate and rapid program for a manned Mars expedition would have been obvious, large-scale signs of life and/or intelligent occupation of the planet (i.e., large structures, etc.).

The real issue, then, becomes: Did the Mariner 4 optics have the ability to show such things? Had we run an Earth encounter with Mariner 4, would the images and other data sent back have been the least bit helpful in identifying whether or not Earth sustained life, much less intelligent life?

I have a pretty fair idea that they would not... And if not Earth, how Mars?

-the other Doug

--------------------

You (machines) can't stop Smith. I can.
- Neo

[nprev]

Adroitly hijacked, oDoug!

In answer to your question, probably not...but the craters in the images perpetuated a "Moon-like" perception that really took the air out of the entire impetus at its very beginning. If M4 had flown over Olympus Mons instead, how different would our initial and enduring perceptions have been?

[Guest_Myran_*]

Im not that certain I agree with you dvandorn.

At the time of the first probes to Mars, hardly anyone in their right mind did believe there were canals made by any contemporary intelligent life on Mars. That except a few science fiction writers, but I dont include Arthur C or Bradbury with 'the Martian chronicles' there - at least I did read the story of the latter as one allegory of what happened to the native american peoples. With that perspective it was also a grand impact personally with my own similar perspective.

But we were supposed to get the subject back on track here!

Lets take the ideas we had about Mars at that time and imagine they had been on the mark!

Many of the public, and some scientists wanted to believe the planet had wide areas of moss or lichens as well as some smaller patches of liquid water on the surface. This was a widespread idea to explain the seasonal variations we now know are caused by atmospheric haze and sandstorms.

So if the ideas of that time would have been correct, such vegetation could have been visible from orbit or flyby missions. In addition Mars would have had a thicker atmosphere with a large part of nitrous oxides which is a greenhouse gas which would have caused a warmer climate.

With all those characteristics taken together, Mars could have been directly habitable!
Not with one breathable atmospehere, far from it, but a higher partial pressure would have simpified many things like any building as well as spacesuits. And with vegetation and nitrous oxides in the atmosphere that might be turned into fertilizers and nitrate compounds so the intrepid pioneers might actually could have been able to grow crops directly in the soil there. And the colonizer would have been a happy individual indeed, all he would have to do was to remove his helmet or breathing mask to take a sniff for a good laugh now and then.

All things taken together would have made Mars valuable land for the superpowers, so if this make-belief land had been true - I would think the space race would have been aimed at Mars instead of the Moon, since Russia and USA would have fought to be the first to claim this new land for their political system and philosophy.

[OWW]

What if the Mariner pictures had shown a Lowellian Mars instead? Now that would have inspired the Space Program!

This reminds me of a SciFi favorite of mine: the short story 'The Gods of Mars' (by Gardner R. Dozois, Jack M. Dann & Michael Swanwick) in which a bunch of astronauts arrive at Mars while a global dust storm is raging. When the dust finally settles they can't believe what they are seeing... Highly recommended.

[Decepticon]

Could someone here try to recreate what Mariner 4 would have seen if it did cross areas?

[Bill Harris]

Back then we thought that we were masters of the universe and could do anything to everything. Look at the environmental disasters we were creating on Earth. And we were wanting to terraform Mars-- can you imagine what would happen if were introduced a large quantity of water and an atmosphere into the Martian environment? The place likely would not be habitable for the next 4 billlion years...

The fantasies of childhood.

--Bill

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

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).

[Guest_DonPMitchell_*]

Back then we thought that we were masters of the universe and could do anything to everything. Look at the environmental disasters we were creating on Earth. And we were wanting to terraform Mars-- can you imagine what would happen if were introduced a large quantity of water and an atmosphere into the Martian environment? The place likely would not be habitable for the next 4 billlion years...

The fantasies of childhood.

--Bill

Can you be more explicit about why you think terriforming Mars would not be possible?

[edstrick]

The Mariner 4 sim looks entirely reasonable. Note that Mariner did see graben radial to Tharsis crossing the large crater in frame 11 as a "lineation" which was noted, but not resolved as an actual graben.

Mariner 6 clearly recognized chaotic terrain, tentatively identified as "thermokarst" as well as the large chaos regions on the east end of Valles Marineris. The chaotic terrain was seen in 2 or 3 narrow angle frames, while eastern Valles Marineris was poorly seen in high-sun wide-angle frames, disappearing into camera-noise toward the noontime limb.

The large depressed areas were also sort-of recognized in UV spectrometer rayleigh-scattering atmosphere depth sensing and IR spectrometer CO2 absorption depth sensing.