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The Moon and Mars
Jul. 20th, 2003 02:17 pmThirty-four years ago today, a couple of guys landed on the Moon and walked around there for a few hours. I was watching on TV, though I don't remember anything about that; I was barely one year old.
What I do remember vividly was that twenty-seven years ago today, the unmanned spacecraft Viking 1 landed on Mars, the first successful probe to do so (some Russian ones had reached Mars in a less gentle manner earlier; sending probes to Mars remains a difficult and dicey affair to this day). I was eight years old. I had followed the mission avidly in such places as National Geographic World magazine, so I was tremendously excited when the landing actually happened.
The TV networks broke into the morning's programming periodically for updates (the actual landing had already taken place in the wee hours); when the first picture was released, they cut in to show that (though, again, apparently it wasn't live, since it had been taken hours earlier and the speed-of-light transit time isn't that long). It was summer vacation, and my sister Megan and I were at home watching. CBS interrupted Captain Kangaroo to show it, and Megan was greatly annoyed. I tried to explain to her the importance of what she was seeing, but she pointed out that it was just a picture of rocks-- and one that took its sweet time appearing, vertical stripe by vertical stripe, since the Viking cameras (two of them, for stereoscopic imaging) each had a narrow vertical aperture in a rotating turret.
The next successful Mars landing didn't take place until 1997: the ingenious, relatively low-budget Mars Pathfinder mission, with its toy-like Sojourner rover. Like many people, I followed that one mostly on the Web. One of the fascinating things about it was watching NASA cope for the first time, and somewhat by the seat of their pants, with the scaling and design problems of a Web site made suddenly popular by a public event. It would be a harbinger of things to come, on Earth if not so much on Mars.
Kibo and I spotted Mars last night, rising after 11 PM and uncharacteristically brilliant, distinguishable by its rust-red color (though I've always been a little worse than average at seeing the colors of stars and planets). Mars is currently heading for its closest opposition with Earth in many thousands of years, so it will be quite a sight in coming weeks. And after many embarrassing failures and exciting successes, there are more space probes on the way.
What I do remember vividly was that twenty-seven years ago today, the unmanned spacecraft Viking 1 landed on Mars, the first successful probe to do so (some Russian ones had reached Mars in a less gentle manner earlier; sending probes to Mars remains a difficult and dicey affair to this day). I was eight years old. I had followed the mission avidly in such places as National Geographic World magazine, so I was tremendously excited when the landing actually happened.
The TV networks broke into the morning's programming periodically for updates (the actual landing had already taken place in the wee hours); when the first picture was released, they cut in to show that (though, again, apparently it wasn't live, since it had been taken hours earlier and the speed-of-light transit time isn't that long). It was summer vacation, and my sister Megan and I were at home watching. CBS interrupted Captain Kangaroo to show it, and Megan was greatly annoyed. I tried to explain to her the importance of what she was seeing, but she pointed out that it was just a picture of rocks-- and one that took its sweet time appearing, vertical stripe by vertical stripe, since the Viking cameras (two of them, for stereoscopic imaging) each had a narrow vertical aperture in a rotating turret.
The next successful Mars landing didn't take place until 1997: the ingenious, relatively low-budget Mars Pathfinder mission, with its toy-like Sojourner rover. Like many people, I followed that one mostly on the Web. One of the fascinating things about it was watching NASA cope for the first time, and somewhat by the seat of their pants, with the scaling and design problems of a Web site made suddenly popular by a public event. It would be a harbinger of things to come, on Earth if not so much on Mars.
Kibo and I spotted Mars last night, rising after 11 PM and uncharacteristically brilliant, distinguishable by its rust-red color (though I've always been a little worse than average at seeing the colors of stars and planets). Mars is currently heading for its closest opposition with Earth in many thousands of years, so it will be quite a sight in coming weeks. And after many embarrassing failures and exciting successes, there are more space probes on the way.