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Mariner Mars 1964, Mariners 3 and 4 to Mars: imaging plans?
gndonald
post Aug 9 2005, 02:04 PM
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QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Apr 29 2005, 08:05 PM)
Bruce:

"Tell us about it, Janet!"

A 1959 Venus Orbiter - betcha it wasanother NOTSNIK!
*


I'm also intrigued about this and the current status of the Mariner IV data analysis page mentioned above.
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The Messenger
post Aug 11 2005, 10:22 PM
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In 1964, the question of whether there were 'canal' on Mars was still open, and although the Mariner 4 photos produced no evidence of canal, there was enough graininess to leave the question open - at least for the 'Hoaglandites'.

With both Mariner 3 and 4, they were hoping to get as close as possible, within NASA planet contamination control constraints, which was about 6000km.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntr..._1968009274.pdf
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Guest_PhilCo126_*
post Oct 27 2005, 04:49 PM
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Phil Stooke ... when will You start the work on the Mars exploration book ?
An interesting source for writing books & articles are the NASA Technical Reports written for each mission... I have made a list of the most important Tech Reports at the weblink below ( with thanks to Donald Boggs for hosting the list on his excellent spaceflight books website ) smile.gif

http://www.boggsspace.com/jpl_tech_reports.htm

Best regards,
Philip
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Phil Stooke
post Oct 27 2005, 04:50 PM
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I'm in the editing phase on the Moon book. Next year at this time I hope to begin the Mars book.

Phil


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... because the Solar System ain't gonna map itself.

Also to be found posting similar content on https://mastodon.social/@PhilStooke
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_PhilCo126_*
post Oct 27 2005, 05:18 PM
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Great Phil ... don't hesitate to contact me whenever You need some information wink.gif
By The Way are You also on forum collectSpace.com ?
Best regards,
Philip
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Tom Tamlyn
post Oct 29 2005, 02:22 AM
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In Bruce Murray's book "Journey into Space: The First Three Decades of Space Exploration" (1989), Murray gives an account of of a coup he pulled off for one of the early planetary spacecraft, which might be relevant to the quantum leap to which Bruce refers.

In the process of designing a mission, Murray was frustrated by the bandwidth limitations of communications with the Deep Space Network. Despite what Murray described as a policy of DSN to reveal as little information as possible to other NASA centers, an unguarded remark in a paper by a DSN engineer gave Murray an inkling that DSN's actual communications abilities were substantially (orders of magnitude?) better than it was willing to admit.

Murray made them 'fess up, and the mission's product return goals were substantially increased.

***

My memory tells me that this anecdote related to a sixties mission and that the destination was Mercury, but one of these must be false, since Mariner 10 wasn't launched until 1973. I owned the book briefly when it came out, thanks to an enthusiastic review in the NYT, despite the fact that my interest in space exploration was in a decades-long lull that didn't pass until December 2003. I had expected an armchair tour of Pioneer, Voyager, etc., and was disappointed by Murray's focused recollections of small group interactions and institutional politics. I had to borrow another copy from the library to reread it last spring, when I found it much more interesting. The account of early Shuttle politics is grimly fascinating.

Murray also singles out for criticism one or more eighties NASA administrators who couldn't be bothered to show up for important unmanned spacecraft rendezvous. The more recent administrators are doing much better.

Tom Tamlyn

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Apr 30 2005, 09:35 AM)
While the '69 Mariners were indeed a complete quantum leap upwards from the earlier Agena-launched Mariners in many ways, though, I think the most dramatic was the incredible leap in their communications rate from 8 bps for the earlier Mariners to fully 16,200 bits for the '69 Mariners.  I couldn't believe that figure when I first read it in 1968 and thought it was a misprint -- especially since the earlier design for the "Mariner B" line of spacecraft on which Mariner 69 was patterened only had a bit rate of (I think) 256 bps.  However, there had been very dramatic improvements in communcations technology since Mariner B was designed in 1962, and NASA decided to take full advantage of them.
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Guest_PhilCo126_*
post Nov 28 2005, 05:54 PM
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Phil ... with ' information ' I meant in fact 'documentation' as I have a large collection of NASA photos showing unmanned spacecraft being tested & assembled before launch... So if You need a High Res photo, don't hesitate to contact me!
Philip
http://mars-literature.skynetblogs.be/
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tasp
post Nov 29 2005, 03:32 AM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Apr 28 2005, 04:52 PM)
Coming soon, if you're all nice to me: a brief report on how NASA came within one month of trying to launch a VENUS ORBITER in June 1959 (although it definitely would have failed had it been launched).  One of the most bizarre forgotten episodes of the early Space Age.
*



The only information I could find in my library was a reference to Atlas Able 4. Launch date seems to have been 11/26/1959 and the launch was a failure. Payload was a TV camera to view the earth's moon from lunar orbit. Original destination was Venus. Weight was under 400 lbs.

What's "the rest of the story"?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Should we fawn or something?

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mcaplinger
post Nov 29 2005, 05:40 AM
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QUOTE (Tom Tamlyn @ Oct 28 2005, 06:22 PM)
In the process of designing a mission, Murray was frustrated by the bandwidth limitations of communications with the Deep Space Network.  Despite what Murray described as  a policy of DSN to reveal as little information as possible to other NASA centers, an unguarded remark in a paper by a DSN engineer gave Murray an inkling that DSN's actual communications abilities were substantially (orders of magnitude?) better than it was willing to admit. 

Murray made them 'fess up, and the mission's product return goals were substantially increased. 

*


Not quite. The mission was Mariner Venus-Mercury 1973 (aka Mariner 10) but the realization was that if the bit error rate was increased the bit rate could also be increased, and with imaging it didn't matter much if the bit error rate was higher, since isolated bad pixels could be removed with simple filtering techniques (such as median filters.) MVM73's bit rate was 117 Kbps at a BER of 5e-3 for this reason.

See http://history.nasa.gov/SP-424/app-b.htm for more info.


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Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Nov 29 2005, 05:56 AM
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Fawning won't be necessary. It was indeed the originally planned destination of one of the 1959 Atlas-Able probes. It and the probe that later became Pioneer 5, after being launched in 1960, were to be launched in the direction of Venus in the first few days of June 1959 -- but Pioneer 5 (lauched by a Thor-Able, later to be renamed Thor-Delta) had no midcourse correction system and so would certainly have missed Venus by a great distance, whereas the spin-stabilized Atlas-Able probe had two hydrazine engines pointing out its two poles. The rearward pointing one could be fired four times; the forward-pointing one only twice (at least in the lunar version), with one of those burns being for final orbit insertion -- but apparently they had some confidence that this awkward setup could put them close enough to have a shot at orbiting Venus.

This thing came astonishingly close to being launched -- the front-page headline for the NY Times on (I believe) May 1, 1959 shows the mission being cancelled only then, apparently because the planned science experiments couldn't be gotten ready in time. I've spent years trying to find out what those experiments were, but the only clue I've found is a single paragraph in a 1959 issue of "Astronautics" magazine quoting a Lousisiana Congressman on "Meet the Press" who very briefly described them in a way which implies that they were exactly the same as on the second Atlas-Able Pioneer, which was scheduled for a launch to the Moon later in 1959. That is, they were particles and fields experiments, plus an IR photometer that could build up a low-resolution spin-scan map -- of the Moon's farside, or (presumably) Venus' cloud tops. (I'd assume that such a craft could have carried a UV photometer like Mariner 5's, to measure the planet's atomic H and O and thus provide an indirect estimate of its water vapor; but this wasn't mentioned. I also presume that it could, in any case, have carrried out radio occultations of Venus' atmosphere.)

At any rate, after that cancellation, Pioneer 5 was rescheduled for a launch in late 1959 into a solar orbit with its perihelion at Venus' orbit -- and after months of technical delays it ws finally launched in March 1960, although the booster underperformed somewhat and so it fell well short of reaching Venus' orbit. They had hoped to communicate with it at distances of up to 50 million miles, but a slow battery leak finally silenced it 22.5 million miles out -- which still utterly shattered Pioneer 4's radio-range record of 407,000 miles.

The Atlas-Able probe was rescheduled for that single launch to the Moon on Oct. 3 (a day before the Russians launched Luna 3), but its Atlas booster blew itself to kingdom come during a static test on Sept. 24, so they drafted the Atlas that had been scheduled for the second unmanned Mercury "Big Joe" test (which had been cancelled because the first was successful) and attached the Able upper stages and the probe to that instead. It took off on Nov. 26 and immediately failed ignominiously because its payload shroud hadn't been adequately vented and came off due to internal air pressure about 45 seconds after launch; the air blast quickly tore off the probe and the third stage, and damaged the second state enough to knock out its radio (apparently it then ignited without separating from the Atlas). This, of course, would have happened had it been launched to Venus.

Since the cancellation of the Venus launch meant that they still had a second such probe built, the White House ordered a third probe to be built, one launch attempt to be made in 1960, and the third probe launched only if that first 1960 effort failed. Alas, they too both failed. (Neither carried that IR scanner; instead, they were the very first US spacecraft to carry plasma analyzers.)

Clearly NASA's very early ambitions exceeded its grasp; the agency must have initiated this plan almost as soon as it was created at the start of 1959. It's very hard to find data on the Venus plan for this thing, but I first heard about it at age 11 from the space column of a 1959 back issue of "Sky & Telescope". You can find sprinkled references to it in other places, such as Aviation Week -- and notably that NY Times front-page headline article -- but about a decade ago, when I corresponded with one of the experimenters for the Atlas-Able probes' radiation experiments to try and get more information on it (he'd written a late 1980s nostalgic retrospective in a major science journal), I was thunderstruck to learn that HE had never heard of the Venus part of the plan!
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Nov 29 2005, 06:05 AM
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You can find a brief Web reference to it: a chapter of Homer Newell's official 1979 NASA history document "Beyond the Atmosphere: The Early Years of Space Science: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4211/ch10-4.htm . (There were nine early Pioneers rather than eight, though -- he forgets the Air Force's very first lunar Pioneer attempt in August 1958.)
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tasp
post Nov 29 2005, 06:19 AM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Nov 29 2005, 12:05 AM)
You can find a brief Web reference to it: a chapter of Homer Newell's official 1979 NASA history document "Beyond the Atmosphere: The Early Years of Space Science: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4211/ch10-4.htm .  (There were nine early Pioneers rather than eight, though -- he forgets the Air Force's very first lunar Pioneer attempt in August 1958.)
*



Amazing!

NASA certainly had the 'vision thing' right out of the starting gate. I suppose with no past negative experiences in trying an ambitious planetary mission, everyone involved was pretty gung-ho to orbit Venus.

Egad, what if they had tried and succeeded?

Appreciate the update on this, I had never expected to know any more than what I posted about Atlas Able 4. Jane's had put out a reference book in 1987 that had a brief blurb on the mission. They did have a launch photo of Atlas Able 5, too.

Wonder what else they were thinking about back then?
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edstrick
post Nov 29 2005, 07:59 AM
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Random note: The UV photometer that flew on Mariner 5 to Venus was supposed to fly on Mariner Mars 64, but the instrument had high voltage electrical problems during development, and was replaced by a mass model (and maybe electrical-draw model, to preserve fidelity to all spacecraft/instrument interactions) that of couse did nothing scientifically. The problems were fixed in time for Mariner Venus 67.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Nov 29 2005, 08:00 AM
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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.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Nov 29 2005, 08:07 AM
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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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