Captain Kangaroo and Mars

While I watched Captain Kangaroo as a kid, and liked it, Bob Keeshan's show wasn't as important to my young life as that of his friend and colleague Fred Rogers. But my younger sister Megan was a huge fan. When I got a little older and went to school, the show would always be starting around the time I had to get on the bus.

This is by way of explaining that it's strange hearing of Keeshan's passing at the same time as all the news from Mars, because Captain Kangaroo and Mars have always been associated in my head since July 20, 1976. I was home for summer vacation, watching Captain Kangaroo with Megan, and CBS News broke into the show with updates about the Viking 1 lander's first pictures from Chryse Planitia.

I was tremendously excited, having followed the mission in the newspaper and in National Geographic World for months, but Megan was upset that they cut into Captain Kangaroo and thought little of my explanations of how important this was.

(For years I thought that I was seeing the very first picture live as it appeared, but researching the history on the Web, I find that this can't have been right. The downlink actually arrived at JPL hours earlier, and I'm pretty sure that the picture I saw included the horizon; the first shot back from Viking 1 was looking down at the lander's foot pad. Still, I remember seeing a black-and-white scan of the rock-strewn plain slowly appearing a vertical stripe at a time, following the motion of the scanner turret's vertical slit scanning across the landscape.)

Update: OK, I was wrong about the time, or rather I was right originally and figured the time zones backwards later. According to this reminiscence by a team member combined with other NASA information about the short interval between touchdown and landing, it was sometime between five and five-thirty in the morning in California (daylight saving time, presumably) when the footpad picture came back. That would have been between eight and eight-thirty in Virginia, which I'm pretty sure was Captain Kangaroo's time slot, so what we saw that morning probably was the arrival of the footpad image being broadcast live. My memory of seeing the horizon then was probably a false one conditioned by panoramic pictures that appeared later. I don't remember seeing the footpad, probably because it was at the right edge of the image, the part that appeared last.

(But I also remember either JPL or CBS superimposing the words "FIRST PICTURE FROM SURFACE OF MARS" on the image with a crude, blocky character generator, which would only make much sense if that really was the first image.)

Addendum: I apologize for telling the same damn stories over and over. Eventually we all become repetitive old men.

By the way...

There may not be any new pictures from the rover because of its current troubles, but the NASA page has an amazing shot of the landing site taken from Mars Global Surveyor (here's how they did it with examples using the 1997 Pathfinder lander, which was actually considerably harder to see, for practice). The rover site also has some new animations of the landing based on telemetry from the descent as it actually happened (which was a bit hairier than the idealized versions you might have seen earlier).