Time for a new topic. We will look at Viking 2 later.
Pop quiz - which was the first solar system object after Earth and he Moon to be mapped? You at the back? - sorry, it's not Mars. No, the first after Earth and the Moon was Venus, by Francesco Bianchini […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

Here is the state of the sample field at sol 300 in the Viking 1 mission. Only events since the time of the previous map are labelled. This was the first mission which I tried to document like this, step by step, and it set the pattern for all subsequent […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

Time for a new thread. I have been wanting to look at something very different which would not normally be associated with me... but it will take some setting up, so it will come later. For now, I want to look at the amazing Viking Lander missions. After Apollo, Viking was the next giant leap […]

Today I am starting a series of posts on recent lunar missions. We have had a few since my previous Moon sequence. But I will start with a correction to part of my previous set - it's Luna 20. andr59 - this is for you! Looking back, I was puzzling over the locations of the horizon details as I […]

Earlier we saw a map of hydrothermal sites around Tharsis suggested by James Dohm. The combination of warmth and water seemed promising in the search for life (or past life). Here are more of them, suggested in 2 studies in 2005 and 2007. These are not tied […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

Apologies - I am busy with the Resilience crash scene investigation, back on the job tomorrow.

Those landers are supposed to lie on big circles, but they might not look like it because of the map projection. I like the 2 hemisphere look so I use it a lot but I admit it is not the best for these network maps. But other projections have problems too so we are staying with this one.

We've […]

Intermarsnet had many potential sites but only 3 would be used, optimized for seismology. Robert Haberle (NASA Ames) proposed augmenting it with several mini-landers for meteorology, with a much larger latitude range: the Micro-Meteorological Network. The […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

Today we start a new theme... drum roll... I want to look at Mars missions which never happened. Over the last 75 years there have been many ideas about missions to Mars, and I want to explore some of them that didn't fly. I'm a cartographer so the focus is on maps of mission plans, not […]

Collected posts (courtesy of @birchbirch)

Planetary mapping:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Updates_in_Lunar_and_Planetary_Mission_Cartography.pdf

Apollo missions […]