The American school system and science text books from when I was growing up gave the impression that only America did cool things like land suff on other celestial bodies. They just didn't instruct us in what the soviet accomplishments were- this is not a debate over the merits of that action just simply a statement of why the soviet space program is suddenly new and shiney to me in the year 2013. <br /><br />I've been wikipedia-ing the topic and purusing it since the announcement of citizen astronomers locating the possible resting place of the MARS 3 lander on Mars by crowd sourcing the scanning of photographs taken by the most recent NASA mission. Who knew the soviets were first to softly land a craft on Mars. or that they had robotic lunar rovers on the moon. <br /><br />I noticed the comment on the LUNAR 4 mission that it failed to make a course correction and flew by the moon. that means that the craft is still out there and it got me thinking about a plot device for SF: ship jumps into a system and collides with a 200 year old robotic probe that missed its mark and was sailing endlessly out of the star system.<br />A. portray it as the ship being under attack and a crisis situation to start<br />B. then its a series of skill checks to set the damage to rights <br />C. then investigative- "what was that thing?" its largley destroyed so they wont get anything in the way of information but perhaps its course can be back tracked to a point of origin which requires the astrogator to study the solar system and back track the orbits of the planets as well.<br /><br />Need to look around and see if there is a deffinative list of space junk on the Moon and Mars as well.<br />It brings up story lines similar to the Salvage 1 TV series with Andy Griffith. <br />http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvage_1<br /><br />Story lines of Archaeological discover too: perhaps a probe found something and that knowleged was buried.<br />Now decades latter things are coming to light.
- Log in to post comments