Author: Charles River Editors
Narrator: Bill Hare
Unabridged: 1 hr 51 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 07/09/2019
Several years before Mariner 9’s successful orbiting mission, NASA had begun designing missions for unmanned landings on Mars that would use a spacecraft consisting of an orbiter module and a landing module. The design of the modular spacecraft came from NASA’s successful use of a similar spacecraft delivery system for the Apollo program’s manned missions to the Moon.
The Viking 1 landing on Mars had originally been scheduled to coincide with the nation’s bicentennial on July 4, 1976, but the dual celebration did not work out as planned because the original landing site was found to be unfit due to the number of large boulders that would be able to upend the craft upon landing. By then, Viking 1 had been heading to Mars for nearly a year, and Viking 2 was on its way as well. Viking 1’s lander would successfully land on the Red Planet on July 20, 1976.
Both Viking landers were huge successes just for landing on Mars and transmitting data, but they would end up exceeding NASA’s wildest expectations. NASA hoped the Viking missions would provide better images of Mars’ surface and the ability to determine the chemistry and biology of the soil, which might indicate signs of life. The Viking missions ended up providing an extremely comprehensive overview of the Martian surface and atmosphere.
No single figure in 20th century American history inspires such opposing opinions as J. Edgar Hoover, the iconic first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In his time, he was arguably the most powerful non-elected figure in the federal ...
April 16th. The year is 1963. Birmingham, Alabama has had a spring of non-violent protests known as the Birmingham Campaign, seeking to draw attention to the segregation against blacks by the city government and downtown retailers. The organizers lo...
While the period from 1945-1955 was the longest and most extensive period of time in American history when a fear of communism gripped the country, it was not the first. World War I was the first major foreign conflict the U.S. was involved in, afte...
America’s obsession with its own history has resulted in innumerable bestsellers. Like baseball and the Civil War, Prohibition is one of the grand American topics, and now it is the subject of Daniel Okrent’s masterful, prize-worthy tour...
20th century Chicago was an ideal breeding ground for organized crime. A buzzing circuit board dotted with towering skyscrapers, brick buildings, worker's cottages, and an eclectic collection of greystone manors, the Windy City was further decked o...
The Apollo space program is the most famous and celebrated in American history, but the first successful landing of men on the Moon during Apollo 11 had complicated roots dating back over a decade, and it also involved one of NASA’s most infa...
Although Apollo 11’s successful mission to the Moon is seen as the culmination of the Space Race, and the Apollo program remains NASA’s most famous, one of the space agency’s most successful endeavors came a few years later. In fac...
In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of t...
On paper, the extraordinarily unorthodox ideology spouted by Heaven's Gate ranks near the top of the list of most outlandish end-of-the-world prophecies, and it was built on a blend of Christian, Gnostic, supernatural, New Age, and extraterrestrial...