[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

Just perusing thru the Viking Lander dataseta ( amazing, less than 1CD each - and I've got 9 DVD's for Spirits Pancam Sols 1-270 alone ) and found this three-colour set - I thought it looked fab, and I've never seen it before.

Here's the info...

Product Id  11E123-GRN
Spacecraft Name  VIKING_LANDER_1  Instrument Name  CAMERA_1
Mission Phase Name  EXTENDED MISSION  Target Name  MARS
Start Time  1977-07-31T08:08:51Z  Stop Time  1977-07-31T08:16:12Z
Planet Day Number  366  Local Time  10.70
Start Azimuth  162.50 degrees  Stop Azimuth  245.00 degrees
Center Elevation  10.00 degrees  Sampling Parameter Interval  0.12 degrees
Observation Type  COLOR TRIPLET  Filter Name  GREEN
Gain Number  4  Offset Number  1
Detector Temperature  -18.10  Dust Flag  FALSE
Start Rescan Number  0  Total Rescan Number  0
Scan Rate  16000 BPS  Data Path Type  RECORDED UHF LINK
Line Samples  689  Missing Samples  3

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

The Molniya photos actually came first -- the Soviets released at least one black-and-white one from one of their first Molniyas in late 1965. However, it only showed about half the Earth, and was almost as lousy in resolution as the DODGE photos. For these reasons, none of these early fuzzy full-Earth photos made much of a splash -- the first one to do that was Lunar Orbiter 1's famous black-and-white photo of the earth from the Moon (which was plastered on the wall of Grand Central Station as a billboard), followed by the black-and-white photos from ATS-1 in Dec. 1966 -- the first really good full-Earth photos.

Surveyor 3 -- thanks to landing on a tilted crater slope -- got some EXTREMELY fuzzy color photos of Earth from the Moon, and even during a solar eclipse! But full-Earth color photography only came into its own with ATS-3 in Nov. 1967.

[Bob Shaw]

The Molniya photos actually came first -- the Soviets released at least one black-and-white one from one of their first Molniyas in late 1965.  However, it only showed about half the Earth, and was almost as lousy in resolution as the DODGE photos

Bruce:

The DODGE image was better than I remembered - I found the article in the National Geographic CD-ROM set, and it's not *too* bad... ...much better than the Molniya picture!

Bob Shaw

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