Word: marse
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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The first command was sent when Mariner was still 107,000 miles away from Mars. This turned on the camera's shutter mechanism, started the scan platform searching with a wide-angle sensor for light from Mars, and turned on the tape recorder's power. Everything was going...
At 4:55 p.m., P.D.T., the wide-angle sensor detected the edge of Mars. Twenty-three minutes later, the narrow-angle sensor also picked up Mars. Presumably, the picture-taking sequence had begun. At 5:30 p.m., Jack James, Assistant Deputy Director of JPL in charge of lunar and planetary...
Thin & Dusty. For hours no one would know for sure. While the JPL crew waited anxiously, Mariner swooped around the back side of Mars. It was out of touch with Earth for 54 minutes. During this maneuver, it performed one additional and highly important experiment. Mariner beamed radio signals back...
The dot numbers were recorded in the binary code of ones and zeros, the language of computers. Thus white (0) was 000000, black (63) showed up as 111111. Each picture-actually 40,000 tiny dots encoded in 240,000 bits of binary code-was stored on magnetic tape for transmission...
Computers on Earth digested the pictures, digit by digit, and "developed" them by translating the numerical values into the correct shades of light to be projected onto a photographic film. All told, Mariner was programmed to take and transmit up to 21 such pictures of Mars. But excited Mariner engineers...