"Night of the Encounter"
(As originally broadcast on WTIC, Hartford, CT)


Click on the link below to hear

The Night of the Encohttp://www.goldenage-wtic.org/encounter.htmlunter



Mariner 4 Spacecraft
 

This program originated at the Springfield (Massachusetts) Museum of Science on July 14, 1965 - the day that Mariner 4 photographed the Red Planet and sent pictures to earth. Dick interviewed reknowned scientists in Springfield, Washington, and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Dick's co-host was Richard Hoagland, curator of the museum. An interesting highlight is that a portion of the program was broadcast via a LASER beam. The show was received atop a mountain in Springfield via traditional telephone lines, then sent back to the museum over a LASER supplied and operated by PerkinElmer Corporation now in Waltham, Massachusetts.  Mariner 4 (Mariner-Mars 1964) was the fourth in a series of spacecraft used for planetary exploration in a flyby mode and performed the first successful flyby of the planet Mars, returning the first pictures of the Martian surface. It captured the first images of another planet ever returned from deep space; their depiction of a cratered, seemingly dead world shook the scientific community. Mariner 4 was designed to conduct closeup scientific observations of Mars and to transmit these observations to Earth. Other mission objectives were to perform field and particle measurements in interplanetary space in the vicinity of Mars and to provide experience in and knowledge of the engineering capabilities for interplanetary flights of long duration. The program was originally 5 hours; this version is reduced to a half-hour.

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The Night of the Encounter

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