For those who don't know the
MoonwatchUniverse story:
In
1971, yes 50 years ago, I started writing to NASA HQ in Washington DC - USA and Starcity in Moscow - USSR in order to get photos & lithographs of the ongoing missions. After a few weeks the brown NASA logo enveloppes arrived with lots of crew portraits and NASA mission photos.
After a few months, the Russians also sent cosmonaut crew photographs... I kept writing to both locations until 1997 when the internet took over and neither ever send any photographs... although NASA sometimes a litho of the crew due to be launched... those days are over !
However, I also wrote to both NASA Ames Research Center (Pioneer-Venus and Pioneer 10 & 11) and to NASA JPL - Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena CA (all the planetary missions, Venus, Mars, outer planets, ...)
Over the years I received over
400 photos, some signed by interesting people
👍
Carl Sagan (Voyager, COSMOS TV-series)
Gerald Soffen, James Martin, Bert Gentry Lee (Viking to Mars)
William Pickering, Edward Stone, etc... (JPL directors)
... on topic, a few examples specific for Voyager missions:
Linda Morabito (female flight engineer who discovered the volcano eruptions on the moon Io)
Carolyn Porco (female astronomer who discovered that magnetic fields keep dust particles trapped over the rings of Saturn)
.
NASA engineer
Gentry LEE autographed these 1976 Viking I & II Mars-mission landing sites panoramas...
.
Voyager flight engineer/astronomer
Linda Morabito discovering volcano eruptions on Jupiter's moon Io in March 1979
...
