Comments on: Mariner 10 Image Made New

By: thomas

thomas — Sat, 10 May 2008 23:20:49 +0000

• Mission was approved by NASA in 1969.

• A Science Steering Group was officially formed in September 1969.

• January 1970, a Mariner Venus/Mercury project office was established at JPL.

• Experiments were selected by July 1970.

• July 1971 a contract was negotiated with the Boeing Company, Kent, Washington, for design and fabrication of two spacecraft.

• Finally, the mission plan called for launching the spacecraft between October 16 and November 21, 1973.

But remember the shared technology was devoloped for more than a decade with the evolution of Mariner spacecraft. 10 was the sixth of a series that began with Mariner Venus in 1962 and included Mariner Mars 1964, Mariner Venus 1967, Mariner Mars 1969 and Mariner Mars Orbiter 1971.

By: mike

mike — Sat, 10 May 2008 21:09:02 +0000

Thomas i just had a question and i know you said it would be hard to find but do you know how long it took for NASA to build the Mariner 10?

By: mike

mike — Wed, 07 May 2008 21:35:33 +0000

Thomas thank you appreciate it

By: thomas

thomas — Tue, 06 May 2008 02:47:12 +0000

The Mariner missions were a series of spacecraft that were sent to Mercury, Venus and Mars. Not sure if you will find a clear answer to that… my guess would be from the date of project approval to a few months before launch. many of these missions shared hardware… for instance, Cassini was made possible from investments made to build the Galileo craft.

it was launched November 3, 1973 and arrived March 29, 1974.

By: mike

mike — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:58:48 +0000

Im doing a project for school i was wondering how long it took to build the mariner 10 and also how long it took for the probe to reach Mercury

By: thomas

thomas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:17:51 +0000

you two are awesome science advisers!

By: thomas

thomas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:16:31 +0000

that must have been it then… i wasn’t aware they needed that much time for transmission. although (now that i think of it) i do recall some delay due to NH traveling down through Jupiter’s magnetospheric “tail” as it was busy doing science.

By: Ted Stryk

Ted Stryk — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:53:55 +0000

It is important to remember that it was a few weeks after the flyby before NH began transmitting the bulk of its images, due to the fact that it had to turn its instruments away from Jupiter to do this. Also, note that it took weeks and maybe months (my memory fails me) to send all the data back. The New Horizons team didn’t use the limited mass and power on their spacecraft to build a high speed transmission system, but instead gave it high capacity solid state recorders. Since there won’t be much action for a long time between Pluto and any KBO encounters, it has plenty of time to slowly transmit data back. However, the they of course can’t release images that have yet to be transmitted.

By: Gordan

Gordan — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:53:50 +0000

Well, mostly ESA, yes. Though, they did release Huygens images the same day they were downloaded so…

ESA-only missions (MEX, VEX, Rosetta to some degree) tend to not release anything.

By: thomas

thomas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:44:47 +0000

well color me stupid… i could swear i checked for new images on that site for well over a month and new items would appear long after the flyby. so, who doesn’t release images as the cassini team does… anything ESA right?

By: Gordan

Gordan — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 08:49:21 +0000

The images started to get down only sometime in March IIRC, after the whole closest approach thing was over. It wasn’t a case of them dragging out the releases. I remember clearly, John Spencer was hanging out at UMSF and we were all playing with images of Io’s volcanoes as they came down, before they even released the press release about the volcanoes. This was when the selected first few images were downlinked before the flyby was over, but as additional data came down they regularly posted it. It’s all there in that page I linked to.

I think Alan Stern is very much aware of the power of outreach and they all agreed sharing the images with the public in near real time was the thing to do. As I said, they even went ahead and uploaded partially calibrated images for us - Cassini dumps just pure raw stuff.

By: thomas

thomas — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 07:00:08 +0000

It seemed to take weeks for all the Jupiter images to appear on those pages… was that due to calibrating? I just recall a really slow trickle of images from the encounter over what seemed to be weeks. Do I recall that incorrectly?

By: Gordan

Gordan — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:12:41 +0000

See here: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/soc/

By: Gordan

Gordan — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:07:26 +0000

For the record, New Horizons also featured a raw image page (the pages are probably still there) as soon as the images were being downloaded. The fact the data playback was delayed until after the encounter doesn’t diminish the fact the guys went ahead and provided us with the raw (actually, they were partly calibrated!) imagery almost as soon as they received it. Saying New Horizons made us wait is unfair to the guys behind the mission.