I hope that helps. Babs- you are a hundred light years ahead of me.
All that energy! You wrote about Mars? I looked at the pic, never saw
it before but have a few ideas to ask about.
First. My impulse was to know where everything on the planet WAS!
Landers, orbiters, moon bunnies...And to know the weather conditions,
and to know the materials that everything is made of, and to know
the sequence of shots. As for the pictures, I have only seen yours
in that sequence.
So, to the matter at hand. The relevant lander craft would only be those with
detachable material- fabric, foil, nylon rip-stop (irony), etc.
That gets rid of everything before 1996, aka the year U.S. Pathfinder launched.
I will, however refer to Viking landers, for identification of landmarks.
The Viking craft (sounds scary) used rockets to soft land...
They were able to keep working from 1976 until around 1980!
Pathfinder was a precursor to the experiments ongoing. It had a
miniature rover, it deployed a parachute, rocket brakes, heatshield,
bridal, and airbag (Mom calls it a bouncy).
Was it connected to the picture? Could it have contributed?
I used a radar altimeter map- it really defines the regions.
I also showed the landers on a USGS mosaic map. I put
colorerd dots and abbreviations, and defined distance.
In case anyone cares- here is the middle of Mars, the start.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/figures/P...PIA03207fig.gifThis has longitude, latitude, and the prime meridian, which is about where
Opportunity is, today. A good place to start, too.
http://www.geocities.com/swj20x2/rovers.ht...l?1080230926173The upshot is Opportunity is a long way from any payphone...
Pathfinder is around 400 miles from Viking 1. And Spirit is blissfully
on the other side...
Beagle 2......
That establishes a concept of isolated experiments.