Historical Photo of the Month - March 2009

System Tests
Photograph Number 293-8578Bc

The Mariner Venus Mercury 1973 (Mariner 10) spacecraft was delivered to Florida in the summer of 1973. It was put through a series of system tests in August at what was then known as the System Test Complex, Air Force Eastern Test Range, Cape Kennedy Air Force Station. The photo above shows one of the rooms where computers and recording equipment captured the results of those tests. Gene Brick (foreground) and Noel Burden are shown with the equipment that was shipped to the Cape by truck, along with the spacecraft.

At that time, magnetic tapes like the one held by Brick were used to store data. In the last few decades, thousands of magnetic tapes containing historical spacecraft data were copied to new storage media. The Planetary Data System (PDS) archives and distributes scientific data from NASA planetary missions. The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) is NASA's permanent archive for data from space science missions such as Mariner 10.

The JPL Photolab collected a series of MVM'73 test photos for the System Test and Launch Operations Section (293). The negatives and photo albums were eventually transferred to the JPL Archives and can now be found in the digitized photo album collection (JPL internal access only). You can find other historical photos in the Library/Archives online catalog which are available to the public (Power Search, Type=Photographs).

For more information about the history of JPL, contact the JPL Archives for assistance. [Archival and other sources: photo index; The Voyage of Mariner 10 Mission to Venus and Mercury, NASA SP-424; JPL Telephone Books.]