Mariner 71 (AKA Mariner 9)

A short retelling of space exploration history pertaining to Ed Grondine's theory of Mars exploration and humanities lack of interest there in.

In May have 1971 five spacecraft were planned to journey to Mars. This in spite of the three successful USA mission of Mariner 4, 6 and 7 that clearly showed a Moon like Mars...with only a slight hint of some other terrain in a few of the hundreds of grainy video images they sent back to Earth.

Failure was common back then as it is now. Mariner 9 had a sister ship, Mariner 8, it's Centaur upper stage failed thus it never reached Earth orbit and burned up in the earth's atmosphere. The Soviet Union sent an orbiter that also failed to leave Earth orbit and two missions that combined orbiters and landers. Mars often has global dust storms that obscure the whole planet's surface. Unfortunately this was the case as the Soviet Mars 2 and Mars 3 reached the red planet. They were unprogrammable and promptly started taking picture of the dust clouds surrounding Mars. The two landers faired no better. To be fair even though the orbiters could see nearly nothing they did contribute to the body of science concerning Mars' surface temperatures and in the composition of the planet's atmosphere.

Mariner 9 arrived in orbit a few days before the Soviet missions making it the first spacecraft to successfully enter into orbit about another planetary body. It was a simple machine yet was still programmable and ground control instructed it to wait out the dust storm.

As the storm cleared dark spots began to appear in images from Mariner 9. The first was near the equator at a place called Nix Olympica (the snows of Olympus). Scientists who had studied this area were baffled as to what was being revealed. Some suggested it must be a mountain peak and as the images came in it became clear it had a crater in the middle of it...a caldera. Three other near by dark spots appeared and turned out to also be tall volcanic peaks. Mars not only has atmosphere with weather it had volcanoes...really big ones! Soon a dark slash appeared slightly south and west of Olympus Mons as it is now dubbed. This turned out to be Valles Marineris the greatest canyon complex know in the solar system. Within weeks the dust was gone and the full surface was open to viewing and it was learned that Mariner 4, 6 and 7 had all missed the chasms, meanders and other erosion features so prominent in the Northern Hemisphere of Mars.