Mars Pictures To Show If Life Possible

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32053, 30 July 1969, Page 17

Mars Pictures To Show If Life Possible

(N.Z.P.A .-Reuter— Copyright)

PASADENA (California), July 29.

World television viewers who watched man’s first walk on the moon should get another space-age bonus within the next 24 hours—the first pictures from rust-red Mars.

Television cameras borne towards Mars by the spacecraft Mariners 6 and 7, will not get close enough to show if life exists. But they are expected to pick enough information about water, ice and soil on the planet and the make-up and density of its atmosphere to reveal whether life is possible. The two windmill-shaped spacecraft, which set off from Cape Kennedy nearly five months ago, will have travelled more than 61 million miles when they swoop down to within 2000 miles of the surface of Mars. The cameras of Mariner 6 were switched on last night but the pictures stored inside the craft will not be trans-

mitted back to earth until Wednesday. World television viewers will be able to watch a twohour 52-minute transmission of a series of 33 still photographs through a satellite relay. But the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where the Mariner pictures will be received, does not know yet how many countries will be hooked up to the transmission.

Mariner 6 will reach its closest point tn Mars on Wednesday and Mariner 7 on August 4.

that the Mariner passes near the surface of Mars might prove as important in space exploration as the moon feat. Flight controllers at the jet propulsion laboratory said the Mariner 6 camera seemed to be working well. The quality of the pictures would not be determined until the spacecraft began its television transmission.

The films are expected to clear up long-held speculation that Mars has polar ice caps like the earth and that the rest of the planet is covered with moss.

Officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said they recognised that the moon flight had overshadowed the Mariner flight, but they believed

The first pictures are expected to show the full disc of the planet at a distance and may not be much more detailed than those made by earth telescopes. They should show, however, virtually all faces of the planet as it revolves before the approaching spacecraft Mars, like earth, makes a complete rotation every 24 hours.