Word: martian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tiny transmitters also sent back to earth, some 60 million miles away, the best close-up portrait man has ever had of Mars. At week's end, an identical twin named Mariner 7 moved into position for similar electronic observations. Mariner 6 aimed its close-up cameras on Martian equatorial regions, Mariner 7 at the planet's south polar area. Together they were programmed to photograph about 20% of the Martian surface...
...only one mid-course correction throughout its long journey, and Mariner 7 was almost on target, the flights were not completely trouble-free. Last week one of Mariner 6's infra-red spectrometers balked just as it was supposed to search out the gases and vapors in the Martian atmosphere. JPL technicians explained that the spectrometer, which should be cooled to below - 400° F. to operate efficiently, refused to chill at all. Mariner 7 caused even greater concern at Mission Control when it went off the air entirely for seven hours. Apparently struck by a tiny meteoroid...
Both probes worked at incredibly high speeds. Once the Martian image was captured by their video equipment, it was rapidly translated into electronic signals of varying intensity representing 64 shades of light and dark. Those impulses, in turn, were beamed to earth in the binary language of the computer. To make one complete picture, the spacecrafts' equipment had to scan 665,208 points of light and dark, each of which was converted into six bits of computer information. That five-minute job involved more than 4,000,000 bits for each picture. The poky equipment on Mariner 4 needed...
...largely because of its inability to wrest more funds from a Congress whose members are already divided over the $24 billion tab for Apollo. Last week, as head of a task force on future U.S. space objectives, Vice President Spiro Agnew said the nation should aim for a manned Martian landing by the end of the century. But Agnew conceded that the other members of the panel might be more cautious about a manned Martian expedition...
...same time, NASA will attempt increasingly complex unmanned probes. Two unmanned Mariner spacecraft will soon pass within 2,000 miles of Mars and radio back enough close-up photographs to map about 20% of the Martian surface. In 1973, other Martian orbiters will eject two instrument-packed capsules for soft landings on Mars...