/sci/ - Science & Math

>Late in 1972, Bruce Murray pleaded for a copy of the one-sheet shaded relief map of the whole planet that Batson’s team was making based on the Mariner data. Van der Woude called Batson in Flagstaff, who admitted that Inge and Bridges had finished the map. Plates of it were being made for reproduction. But it was not yet released. Indeed, there were not yet any printed copies.
>Van der Woude persisted; eventually Batson agreed to send the original over to Pasadena, as long as it came back swiftly. Van der Woude gave it to Murray with dire imprecations that it must, but must, be returned in two days. Three days later van der Woude started to think that the normally friendly Murray was avoiding him.
>It took a week or so for van der Woude to corner Murray and find out what had happened. Murray was an ambitious man; within a few years he would be the director of JPL. He had wanted the map to impress Harold Brown—then president of Caltech, later secretary of defense. Brown had thought the map wonderful and asked to show it to a guest, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, too, was impressed and commandeered the map in order to offer it as a gift to Leonid Brezhnev; in part, we can be sure, because the Soviet Union’s two missions to Mars in 1971 had failed, their preprogramming too rigid to allow them to sit out the dust storm in orbit before getting to work, as Mariner 9 had done. And so the map had gone to the Kremlin.

>>15343891
I was thinking a small one pressurized with atmospheric CO2 could be useful for the first base; any vehicle or gadget that can't be dismantled can be moved inside one and worked on by personnel wearing only oxygen masks instead of full pressure suits

>>14735051
near the poles? quite likely as it vents naturally