December 2nd celebrates the first successful Mars landing by the Soviet spacecraft Mars 3 (Mars 1 went missing on the way and 2 crashed). Mars 3 managed to soft land, but was damaged and only managed to transmit for 14.5 seconds. No usable pictures were went. Despite the failure of the landing mission, some data was gathered and, as Mars 2 and 3 were the first to touch down on Mars, we celebrate the date as Mars Landing Day. Seven Mars landing since then have been successful counting the limited success of the Soviet Mars 3. The rest of the successful landers have been American ventures which included, Viking 1 and 2 in 1976, Pathfinder/Sojourner in 1997, Opportunity and Spirit in 2004, Phoenix in 2008 and Opportunity in 2012. A spate of failed missions by the Soviets, NASA, the Japanese, Chinese and British have darkened the history of Martian exploration, but there have been a number of successes as well. Currently there are no spacecraft en route to Mars, however, virtually every space agency has some plans to make another try for Mars, including a couple of private companies, one of which is recruiting a crew for a one-way trip to Mars to establish a permanent colony there.
Tell your sweetie she is out of this world with this
free downloadable printable Mars Landing Day card.
Just click on the
caption below the picture of Mars. Remember, instead of printing from Google Docs, click
on "File" in the upper left corner, then select "Download" and copy the
file to your own computer. Open it with Adobe PDF Reader or whatever
PDF reader you use and print the card from there. For some reason Google
Docs doesn't handle fonts well, even though they are supposed to be
embedded in the PDF document itself.
This is a top fold card, so when it prints, be sure to tell your
printer it's in "portrait" format so you get the whole file. Flip
it
on the short side to print double-sided. This also flips the inside
upside down from the outside when you print in portrait mode, so that,
when you fold it over, the inside comes out right side up. If you're
confused, I encourage you to give it a try with a practice sheet.
© 2013 by Tom King
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