أخذ الصور من المريخ .. كتاب في سبيل موسوعة علمية .. الدكتور أحمد ذكي

Taking pictures of Mars

When the television camera passed by Mars, it took 22 pictures of it, and took them in a pair after a pair, and every two pictures of the pair were on opposite sides of the same region of Mars, that is, one end of the pair was on the other end of the pair. And why

(The planet Mars, as drawn by the artist, according to what astronomers described it before this space experiment. Above and below you can see the North Polar Cap, as well as the South Pole, and they are blue and white, which they think are made of snow. In the picture are dark green areas, which they think are made of plants, and their area increases in It is the spring of Mars, and it decreases in its winter. As for the yellow areas, they have vast deserts.)

The duration of taking a picture takes only a fraction of a second, and there were 48 seconds between taking a pair of pictures and the next pair. The vehicle then converted these images into electrical pulses, which it recorded on a magnetic tape, similar to those on which television images taken on Earth are recorded.

The vehicle then began sending these images to Earth scientists. It took a little more than eight hours to send each image, so one day did not have enough time to send more than 3 images.

- Spacecraft electrical power:

The question that comes to mind now is: Why did it take more than eight hours to send one image to Earth, even though we know that radio waves cover the distance that was between Mars and Earth at that time, which was 134,000,000 miles, in about 12 minutes?

The answer: The reason is the small fuel supply for the vehicle
From the electrical power by which radio signals are sent to the ground.

This power is derived from the sun, and it is supplied to the vehicle for the needs of its day, the need of its hour and its present. It is a transmission power of only ten watts (a terrestrial television has a power of 100,000 watts). It hardly reaches the distant earth until it becomes extremely weak and can barely be seen, were it not for stations with huge antennas. You sense these weak signals, then they have tremendous boosters that raise them millions of times.

For this small supply of electricity, which the vehicle is supplied with, it would have needed ten days to send all these images to Earth.

- Sending pictures of Mars to Earth:

This is a scientific game that satisfies the mind, I mean the mind that feels the need to be full, so satiety, then, is empty and hungry.

A photograph, any image, can be divided into tens of thousands of dots, some of which are completely white and some of which are completely black, and between these two extremes are types of dots whose blackness or whiteness varies in degrees by tens of degrees.

If the vehicle had sent all these points to Earth, in their order in the image, and the Earth’s devices were able to include them, it would have been the same image that was taken from Mars.

But the vehicle does not send white and black dots to Earth. So, they assigned tens to each of these degrees.

(Sending pictures of Mars to Earth: radio signals, which are transformed into photographs)

According to its share of blackness or whiteness, numbers indicate it. These are the numbers that were transmitted by radio, in their order, in the image sent to the people of the Earth.

In the picture you see the large antenna of the ground station that picks up the digital signals from the vehicle, then the amazing calculator that digests the signals, then the converters of the digital signals into the photograph.