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Mars and the History of Antacids
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's retrospective today on the 1976 Mars Viking mission describes the first probe to orbit another planet, and the first biology experiments based on soil sampling. Program managers maintained a dynamic 'worry list', which included a 1970's computer that opened like a wireframe book. The all-important biology experiments could not be tested prior to launch, then lightning struck the probe components (at Kennedy's Explosive Safe Area Building)."
NASA managers found a way to convince the goverment to fund this mission: they told Bush that the martians are developing weapons of mass destruction. They have reliable intelligence: a complete report from secret agent Herbert G. Wells.
I read the article and didn't see TUMS mentioned anywhere.
The coolest voice ever.
http://www.astrobio.net/articles/images/computer_t est.jpg
Thankfully, hairdos miniaturized along with the computers.
Nothing meatier than the summary in the body of it, either.
History of antacids? Whatever. There's nothing especially finger-biting or stomach-churning mentioned in the text, except for a picture of a woman sticking "magnetic wires" "the size of a human hair" into an early computer with circuit boards that swing down - the "wireframe book," apparently.
I'd have loved to have read about how difficult it was to keep materials from being contaminated with dust (shed skin flakes), etc., before launch, or how they decided to shield the circuitry from radiation, and what kinds of weight tradeoffs came up, etc.
But the huge "problems list" section, which takes roughly a third of the article, actually doesn't detail problems, but just things like how the list was made, and how nobody would get in trouble for adding things to the list, and other yay-team filler.
Overall, the whole thing reads like a one-sheet poster for a cheap hands-on museum display. Very disappointing.
Get off my launchpad!
Beware the Giant Hairballs of Mars!
or does that picture remind you of one of the possible unpleseant results of nausea?
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
The article claims that Viking "involved the first probe to orbit another planet", but this is incorrect. Mariner 9 went into orbit around Mars in November 1971, just days ahead of the USSR's Mars 2 and Mars 3 spacecraft. There was also Mars 5 in early 1974 and Venera 9 and Venera 10, two Soviet Venus orbiters, in late 1975.
Sort of gives a whole new meaning to the term "memory pages" now doesn't it?
Especially as those "hair thin wires" are being threaded through the donut-shaped magnetic cores that made up the computer's RAM. (one donut per bit! Ain't core-memory fun?)
Progress is the process of making yesterday's innovations obsolete.?
What is the difference between a small revolutionary change and a large evolutionary change?
I'm surprised they dont' have massive faraday cages around certain areas in those buildings though. The idea of having a multi-billion dollar experiment ruined by EMP from a close-call stray bolt of lightning would scare me more than the bolt itself.
You can find a huge selection of other NASA-related books (including charts, diagrams and pictures) here.
Its that very contrution technique shown in those pictures why memory is sometimes refered to as 'pages'.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
The one really interesting item in this otherwise mundane article is the revelation that the biology experiment platform was delivered too late to be adequately tested.
This gives a new credibility to the scientists that are challenging the results of the Viking lander biological experiments. Basically, we cannot even be sure these instruments were performing as designed.
So if the ESA and NASA probes send results that contradict Viking's in some way, nobody should be surprised.
Little green men haven't been ruled out yet! -:)
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Maybe the lighning strike is the reason that the data about life were inconclusive. Either there is life but Voyager decided to hide it from us, or Voyager was detecting its own newly alive self. I learned about this stuff from a documentary movie called "Short Circuit."
This space available.
EMP's (such as those from nuclear weapons) can cause fairly dangerous inductive currents in metal objects. Electrical arcs through the air (lightning) cause very little EM radiation, which in turn causes negligible inductive currents. Notice how lightning causes just a little pop on an AM radio? That's the EMP from the lightning amplified and it's barely audible, much less dangerous.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.