... Viking was designed to orbit Mars and to land and operate on the planet's surface. ... After studying orbiter photos, the Viking site certification team considered the original landing site for Viking 1 unsafe. ... Certification of a new landing site took place in time for a Mars landing on September 3, 1976, at Utopia Planitia, at 47.7њN latitude, and 225.8њ longitude. ... Changes in the Martian surface occur extremely slowly, at least at the Viking landing sites. ...

MARS-96 . ROBOTIC SPACECRAFT MISSION TO MARS. ... Scientific goals . ... Orbiter . ... the experiments . ... SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVES OF THE ORBITER EXPERIMENTS . The experiments on board the orbiter should study the atmosphere and surface of Mars with remote sensing methods. ... Measurements of the elemental composition with a gamma-spectrometer (PHOTON experiment) and of the mineralogical composition with IR-spectrometers (OMEGA and PFS) make it possible to get data about the nature of rocks. ...

... Launch Date: 1966-08-10 . ... The Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft was designed primarily to photograph smooth areas of the lunar surface for selection and verification of safe landing sites for the Surveyor and Apollo missions. ... The spacecraft was placed in a cislunar trajectory and injected into an elliptical lunar orbit for data acquisition. ... An 80-millimeter lens system was used to obtain Medium-Resolution (MR) photos, and a 610-millimeter lens system was used for High-Resolution (HR) photos. ...

Cosmic Research, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 435­488. Translated from Kosmicheskie Issledovaniya, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 453­508. Original Russian Text Copyright © 2004 by Veselovsky, Panasyuk, Avdyushin, Bazilevskaya, Belov, Bogachev, Bogod, Bogomolov, Bothmer, Boyarchuk, Vashenyuk, Vlasov, Gnezdilov, Gorgutsa, Grechnev, Denisov, Dmitriev, Dryer, Yermolaev, Eroshenko, Zherebtsov, Zhitnik, Zhukov, Zastenker, Zelenyi, Zeldovich, Ivanov-Kholodnyi, Ignat'ev, Ishkov, Kolomiytsev, Krasheninnikov, Kudela,