 This special aeronautics and space report brought to you by NASA. Mariner maps entire Martian surface. Pioneer halfway to Jupiter. Surveying our Earth's resources. New advances in aeronautics. And the last two Apollo flights to the moon. 1972, a year of significant achievement. These are the highlights. The mysterious red planet Mars is not nearly as puzzling as it used to be, thanks to this spacecraft, Mariner 9. Mariner 9 orbited Mars continuously for more than half a Martian year. Probing, sensing, and photographing as the seasons changed below. These are some of the things we've learned. Mars has been geologically active with volcanic mountains. There are indications that free-flowing water may have existed sometime in past Martian history. Observe from above, were huge impact craters and wind-blown dunes. The more than 7,000 pictures returned by Mariner have enabled scientists to map the entire Martian surface. And pinpoint landing sites for the unmanned Vikings scheduled to soft land there in 1976. Jupiter, a thousand times larger than Earth. Distinguished by glowing yellow-orange and blue-gray stripes, it appears to have its own internal energy source. And is so massive that it is almost a small star. We launched a spacecraft toward Jupiter. Called Pioneer 10, it's still a quarter of a billion miles away from this largest planet in our solar system. As it flies by Jupiter in late 1973, its cameras and sensors will return the first pictures and data ever recorded at such a close range. This is what the orbiting astronomical observatory named Copernicus looked like before it was launched last August. Equipped with sensitive precision instruments, including a 32-inch diameter telescope, this heaviest of our unmanned spacecraft is studying stars and galaxies to gain a better understanding of how they evolve and eventually die. Now in orbit above the Earth's distorting atmosphere, Copernicus has a clear view of the stars and is returning important new information to astronomers every day. In cooperation with the Italian government, NASA orbited another in the Explorer series of spacecraft. The small astronomy satellite was launched from a platform in the Indian Ocean to study Earth's sun interactions and especially search for gamma-ray sources. 84 sounding rockets were launched from NASA's Wallops Island Station in Virginia and other sites with payloads to study phenomena affecting the Earth's atmosphere. These small, relatively inexpensive rockets are telling us a lot about near-Earth space below the region where satellites orbit. A comprehensive program to study and make better use of our Earth's resources is in full swing. High altitude planes and the new Earth Resources Technology Satellite are returning thousands of high quality pictures of the Earth. As a result, scientists hope to better understand our planet, its forests, crops, geology and pollution. A new Nimbus Research and Development Weather Satellite is taking the first vertical temperature readings from space through clouds. It is also monitoring a mysterious disappearing current off the west coast of South America and thermally mapping the Earth's surface so geologists can better understand what's happening below the crust. Two commercial communication satellites were launched for the Communication Satellite Corporation. Adding new telephone and television channels, both craft become part of the Global Communication Satellite Network. The A in NASA stands for Aeronautics with a wide range of projects underway. For example, this airplane is equipped with a digital computer that was developed for the flight control system of the Apollo lunar lander. Its use in planes of the future should make air travel smoother and safer. Many aeronautical problems are studied in NASA wind tunnels without having to test full size planes. Engineers can, for instance, test a tail or wing section to destruction. Knowing in advance where structural weaknesses are makes it possible to design out many problems before the first plane is manufactured. To help relieve airport congestion, NASA is test flying short take off and landing planes like this one. Stole planes, as they are called, need very little runway to either take off or land and may play an important role in providing convenient short haul intercity transportation. Research is continuing to make presently operating commercial jet aircraft engines quieter and also to develop the technology for a new quieter engine. Less noisy take off and landing procedures are another area of study. Much of this work is being done by NASA's Lewis Research Center in Cleveland and the Ames Research Center near San Francisco. Fourteen times the wingless M2 lifting body was dropped over a dry lake desert near the flight research center in California. Craft like the M2 are forerunners of the reusable space shuttle that will fly a space mission then return to Earth landing like an airplane. During his visit to Russia, President Nixon signed an agreement with Chairman Kosigin of the USSR to conduct an Earth orbital rendezvous and docking in 1975 between a U.S. and a Russian spacecraft. Engineers from both countries have already begun working out the details of the mission. To help pave the way for the longest Skylab mission next year, astronauts Krippen, Thornton and Bobko spent 56 days locked in a 20-foot long altitude chamber at the manned spacecraft center Houston. The purpose was to collect medical data which can be compared with that collected from the real Skylab flights. Skylab crew training and spacecraft assembly and testing is also well underway. Skylab will be this country's first space station. It will be used as a platform to study the sun, the Earth and man himself. Apollo 16 with astronauts Young, Mattingly and Duke and Apollo 17 with astronauts Cernan, Evans and Schmidt marked the fifth and sixth times Americans landed on the moon. These two flights also concluded the Apollo program. But as astronaut Eugene Cernan said before Apollo 17, it's not the end but the beginning. This special report brought to you by NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.