4 years ago I prepared a series of articles on the subject of " Mapping the planet Mars & its Moons "...
At JPL I asked about the Mariner 9 globes and they confirmed there's still one at JPL somewhere in a warehouse!
What a shame, I believe they should show it during the upcoming JPL Open House weekend of 03 & 04 May 2008
I have a lot of information about these globes and to summarize:
The task of planning & supervising the mosaicing of the 4-foot globes was assigned to Elmer Christensen, who designed the protractor to precisely locate the 1500 photographs on each globe.
Each Mariner 9 mapping image was produced in one of three projections: "Mercator" for the equatorial latitudes, 'Polar Stereographic' for the polar regions and 'Lambert' for the intermediate regions.
The first globe was re-photographed in 452 roughly rectangular segments, which allowed the construction of a 6-foot diameter globe for the von Karman auditorium of the JPL campus in pasadena CA.