When Mariner 9 arrived in the neighborhood of Mars last November, its TV cameras were thwarted by the billowing yellow dust clouds of a gigantic storm that obscured most of the surface of the Red Planet. Frustrated scientists and controllers at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory began to despair that their spacecraft would ever fulfill its primary mission: mapping the surface of Mars. But by mid-January the Martian skies had cleared, and Mariner began sending back detailed pictures. Last week NASA released the latest group of Mariner photographs. Transmitted across more than 100 million...
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