The MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR Mission
February 4. 1999
:
The MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR Mission
February 4. 1999
:Aerobraking is Over!
The Orbit is Now Circular!
It is 2 AM PST on February 4, 1999, and we can confirm that Mars Global Surveyor's aerobraking is COMPLETE! and the spacecraft's orbit has been raised out of the atmosphere for good.
A 61 m/s bipropellant main engine burn on 04-FEB-99 at 12:11 AM PST did the job perfectly!
The Spacecraft Team at LMA in Denver confirmed the propulsion performance, as well as nominal performance by all of the spacecraft's other subsystems, during a small window of telemetry data after the spacecraft turned away from the burn attitude and telecommunications were reestablished over the high gain antenna to DSN station 63 at Madrid. A preliminary assessment of the doppler data by the Navigation Team at JPL also confirmed a good maneuver. It appears that all of the orbit parameters that we had targeted to have been achieved.
Some of the earliest pictures from Global Surveyor
Pic-3 (Martian river)
Pic-4 (Pic-3 close-up)
Since the famous picture of
"The Face" was published some years ago, the Cydonia-mystery has grown. A lot of people has spent years of examining the Viking-pictures and made their own theories about the matter. In addition to the Face, there are a lot of other anomalies in the Cydonia-area: The City, The Fortress, The DM-Pyramid a.s.o. Several movies have been made and a shelf-full of books have been published discussing the problem.The Global Surveyor Mission will perhaps give us the ultimate answers concerning the Cydonia Area. NASA was breaking the news on March 31. 1998.
LATEST PICTURES FROM CYDONIA:
Here are the original pictures from the Viking probe:
Global Surveyor's picture of the Face:
CYDONIA-links:
MARS-links:
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