On the First Panorama of the Surface of Mars

摘要

The conditions for video transmission from the panoramic camera of the Mars-3 lander are analyzed. The latter is known to have made the first soft landing on Mars in 1973 during a severe dust storm resulting in damage to the lander. This damage is believed to have reduced the lander's operation time to 20 s and, apparently, prevented it from achieving the necessary orientation on the surface. If we assume that the lander is lying on its side, then the camera's panoramic axis would be not vertical, but nearly horizontal. In such a case, we can reproduce, by removing the noise and interferences from the video signal by modern methods, a panoramic fragment, which can help assess the structure of the surface near the landing site of Mars-3.