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Star Stuff: An Exploratory Case Study of the Cosmos Television Franchise

1975 - Viking I & II

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This 1970's NASA movie shows the results of the Mariner 9 mission -- which produced hundreds of photographs of the planet's surface, creating a new understanding of the planet's geography and atmosphere. At 7:30 , the film discusses the 1976 Viking mission including the dropping of a lander onto the planet's surface. The film speculates that the lander could find life on Mars, and shows at 8:00 possible types of Martian life that could be encountered, including creatures that extract water from rocks, or microscopic organisms. Mariner 9 (Mariner Mars '71 / Mariner-I) was an unmanned NASA space probe that contributed greatly to the exploration of Mars and was part of the Mariner program. Mariner 9 was launched toward Mars on May 30, 1971 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and reached the planet on November 14 of the same year, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit another planet – only narrowly beating the Soviets' Mars 2 and Mars 3, which both arrived within a month. After months of dust storms it managed to send back clear pictures of the surface. Mariner 9 returned 7329 images over the course of its mission, which concluded in October 1972. The Viking program consisted of a pair of American space probes sent to Mars, Viking 1 and Viking 2. Each spacecraft was composed of two main parts: an orbiter designed to photograph the surface of Mars from orbit, and a lander designed to study the planet from the surface. The orbiters also served as communication relays for the landers once they touched down. The Viking program grew from NASA's earlier, even more ambitious, Voyager Mars program, which was not related to the successful Voyager deep space probes of the late 1970s. Viking 1 was launched on August 20, 1975, and the second craft, Viking 2, was launched on September 9, 1975, both riding atop Titan III-E rockets with Centaur upper stages. Viking 1 entered Mars orbit on June 19, 1976, with Viking 2 following suit on August 7. After orbiting Mars for more than a month and returning images used for landing site selection, the orbiters and landers detached; the landers then entered the Martian atmosphere and soft-landed at the sites that had been chosen. The Viking 1 lander touched down on the surface of Mars on July 20, 1976, and was joined by the Viking 2 lander on September 3. The orbiters continued imaging and performing other scientific operations from orbit while the landers deployed instruments on the surface. The project cost roughly 1 billion USD in 1970s dollars, equivalent to about 11 billion USD in 2016 dollars. It was highly successful and formed most of the body of knowledge about Mars through the late 1990s and early 2000s. We encourage viewers to add comments and, especially, to provide additional information about our videos by adding a comment! See something interesting? Tell people what it is and what they can see by writing something for example: "01:00:12:00 -- President Roosevelt is seen meeting with Winston Churchill at the Quebec Conference." This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
Image PSP_001435_2280 was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft on November 16, 2006. The complete image is centered at 47.7 degrees latitude, 134.0 degrees East longitude. The range to the target site was 316.0 km (197.5 miles). At this distance the image scale is 31.6 cm/pixel (with 1 x 1 binning) so objects ~95 cm across are resolved. The image shown here has been map-projected to 25 cm/pixel and north is up. The image was taken at a local Mars time of 3:11 PM and the scene is illuminated from the west with a solar incidence angle of 49 degrees, thus the sun was about 41 degrees above the horizon. At a solar longitude of 136.2 degrees, the season on Mars is Northern Summer. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the instrument was built by Ball Aerospace and Technology Corp., Boulder, Colo.
20 July 2006 Viking 1 landed 30 years ago today, on 20 July 1976. It was the first U.S. landing on Mars and a very exciting time for Mars exploration. Since that time, four additional spacecraft have successfully landed on Mars and conducted their science investigations. Today, new missions to the martian surface are in the works, with landings expected in 2008 (Phoenix) and 2010 (Mars Science Laboratory). The Viking 1 lander is difficult to see in Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) images. The western Chryse Planitia landing site is often obscured by dust hazes and occasional storms, especially during northern winter, which would otherwise be the best time to look for the lander from orbit because the sun casts longer shadows in winter. When the atmosphere is clearest, in portions of the spring and summer, the sun is higher in the sky as seen from MGS's orbit. The spacecraft always passes over the landing site region around 2 p.m. in the afternoon. The suite of pictures shown here describes the best MOC view of the landing site. These were previously released in May 2005, but the MOC team felt that 20 July 2006 is an appropriate time to review this story. The first figure (left) visually tells how the lander was found. The initial observations of the location of Viking 1, as originally determined by members of the Viking science team based on sightlines to various crater rims seen in the lander images (black lines), did not show the detailed features we knew from the lander pictures (middle) to be in the area. Using geodetic measurements, the late Merton Davies of the RAND Corporation, a MGS MOC Co-Investigator, suggested that we should image areas to the east and north of where Viking 1 was thought to be. Timothy J. Parker of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, California), using sightlines to crater rims seen in the lander images (white lines), deduced a location very close to that suggested by Davies. The MOC image of that location, acquired in 2003, showed additional near-field features (rocks associated with a nearby crater) that closely matched the Viking 1 images (center and right frame, where B denotes "Volkswagen Rock"). The inset (upper right) is an enlargement that shows the location of the Viking 1 lander. The MOC image of the Viking 1 lander site (right) was acquired during a test of the MGS Pitch and Roll Observation (PROTO) technique conducted on 11 May 2003. (Following initial tests, the "c" part of "cPROTO" was begun by adding compensation for the motion of the planet to the technique). The PROTO or cPROTO approach allows MOC to obtain images with better than its nominal 1.5 meters (5 ft) per pixel resolution. The image shown here (right) was map projected at 50 centimeters (~20 inches) per pixel. The full 11 May 2003 image can be viewed in the MOC Gallery, it is image R05-00966. In addition to celebrating the 30th anniversary of the first U.S. robotic Mars landing, we note that 20 July is also the 37th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon, on 20 July 1969. There are two dates that are most sacred in the space business (three, if you count the 4 October 1957 launch of Sputnik 1). The other date is 12 April, which celebrates the 1961 launch of the first human in space, and the 1981 launch of the first space shuttle orbiter.