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Here's Looking At You, Kid, MGS Sees Mars Odyssey and Mars Express
Bob Shaw
post May 23 2005, 10:38 AM
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As MGS nears the end of it's lifetime there appear to have been a number of, er, *discretionary* projects undertaken, and - after all - how many panoramic images are you going to take in the darkness beyond the terminator, just where the old birds are going to be well-illuminated...


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djellison
post May 23 2005, 11:29 AM
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Not to mention it's also quite usefull practice for orbital rendezvous w.r.t. MSR in the not TOO distant future. MRO has a nav camera - and MTO will do some on orbit rendezvous experiments.

Doug
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garybeau
post May 24 2005, 10:16 PM
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I did manage to find a couple of tidbits about the Viking orbits. It looks like they were left in pretty eccentric orbits.

"On 7 August 1980 Viking 1 Orbiter was running low on attitude control gas and its orbit was raised from 357 x 33943 km to 320 x 56000 km to prevent impact with Mars and possible contamination until the year 2019. "


The orbiter(Viking 2)developed a leak in its propulsion system that vented its attitude control gas. It was placed in a 302 x 33176 km orbit and turned off on 25 July 1978 after returning almost 16,000 images in 706 orbits around Mars.

http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/viking-1.htm

It looks like we got about another 14 years to get a picture of V1.

Judging by it's orbit, I would say it would be a good time to put a seismometer on the ground and listen for V2's arrival. tongue.gif

Would these orbits have circularized quit a bit by now? With such a low periapsis, it would almost be like a mild aerobraking.


Gary
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ElkGroveDan
post May 25 2005, 03:20 AM
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QUOTE (garybeau @ May 24 2005, 10:16 PM)
I did manage to find a couple of tidbits about the Viking orbits. It looks like they were left in pretty eccentric orbits.

"On 7 August 1980 Viking 1 Orbiter was running low on attitude control gas and its orbit was raised from 357 x 33943 km to 320 x 56000 km to prevent impact with Mars and possible contamination until the year 2019. "


The orbiter(Viking 2)developed a leak in its propulsion system that vented its attitude control gas. It was placed in a 302 x 33176 km orbit and turned off on 25 July 1978 after returning almost 16,000 images in 706 orbits around Mars.

http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/viking-1.htm

It looks like we got about another 14 years to get a picture of V1.

Judging by it's orbit, I would say it would be a good time to put a seismometer on the ground and listen for V2's arrival. tongue.gif

Would these orbits have circularized quit a bit by now? With such a low periapsis, it would almost be like a mild aerobraking.


Gary
*


That was great reading. Thanks for finding those. I was in high school back then and became a Viking news junkie. We are so spoiled these days with the Internet compared to how much information was available back then.


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