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The great Martian dust storm of 1971.

The great Martian dust storm of 1971.

There has only been one comparable global dust storm on Mars since then. What made the 1971 even more significant historically is that the first human orbital probe had arrived at that very moment to record it.

By late 1971 and into January 1972 the storm abated, and Mariner 9 began to send back some spectacular images – a total of over 7,300 pictures that mapped the entire martian surface with resolutions ranging from 1 kilometer per pixel to as good at 100 meters per pixel.

The image here gives a sense of the magnitude of the storm. This was what the scientists began to see as the dust settled. The only visible features are the three great Tharsis Montes shield volcanoes, poking up through the haze in a line. The tallest of these reaches an altitude of over 18 kilometers. These peaks, and the enormous bulk of Olympus Mons had never been imaged by a spacecraft before, earlier flybys had missed them.

The late Bruce Murray (Caltech) was on the camera team and recalls, “there was a gradual clearing, like a stage scene, and three dark spots showed up.” The Mars that came out of the storm was a revelation, from these colossal mountains to the great rift of Valles Marineris and the steep valleys of Noctis Labyrinthus.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

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