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30th Anniversary of Viking Landing on Mars
ewhac writes "30 years ago today, mankind paid our first visit to Mars. Viking 1 made its powered landing on the red planet on 20 July 1976 at 05:12 after an 11-month flight. Images and data from the probe were soon seen all over Earth as we got our first close-up look at our planetary neighbor. Viking 2 landed a few weeks later. Like the Pathfinder rovers that followed in 1997, Viking was expected to last but a short time -- only three months -- but instead continued to gather and return data for six years."
So, when will humans get there?
Isn't it also the anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon (the one that orbits the Earth)?
They just don't build them like they used to.
I can't even get a computer to last 3 months, let alone 6 years.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Those vikings! First they colonized North America. Now we find out they went to Mars too! They were one tough bunch! Masters of intergallactic navigation.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
July 20th, 1969 was the first manned lunar landing. To me, this is a more significant anniversary than Viking.
OK the article starts with "The solar system had welcomed its first interplanetary visitor from Earth, a triumphant moment that marked the start of mankind's efforts to probe its neighbor planet for signs of life and set the sights for every Martian mission to follow." So why is this, when russians sent many probes to mars beforehand? Admittedly none of them the success of Viking but russians still reached the surface first. This stinks.
My cousin was even taught at school that Sally Ride was the first woman into space when this is patently untrue. Why the revisionism? is it just for the sake of a good first few paragraphs or is it something worse?
The posted /. story is confusing the Mars Pathfinder mission and the Mars Exploration Rover mission. The Pathfinder mission was in 1997. The MERs landed in January of 2004 and is still running, far beyond the expected lifetime of the rovers.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html
Still running and still producing valuable data
reliability is what companies should really strive for, consumer throw-away disposable culture is a nasty disease and the sooner its extinct the better
You know what's even more amazing is how the Vikings managed to cross the vast distance on a wind-powered raft.
"...bloody Vikings..." -Monty Python
The Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was first, in 1963. Even if one doesn't remember her exact name, any of us nerds should know something of the history of the space program, like the fact that the Russians put a woman up there first.
So does this mean that in a week we'll be hearing about the 30th anniversery of Viking 2?
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
I remember seeing these amazing photos from Viking, Apollo, and Skylab missions when I was little. Been a fan of the space program ever since, and it's kind of sad to see the bureaucratic monster that NASA has become these days. Yeah, they do lots of neat stuff still - but I think they could do so much more if it weren't for the organizational mess down there. Hopefully private competition from Rutan et al will shake things up a bit.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
Yeah, but could they kick the Vikings' asses in the north Atlantic? It's cold up there, unlike the balmy south Pacific. Can they rape and pillage as well? I think not. I certainly would rather see some Polynesians come ashore than some Vikings.
They produce sounds like "WHANG!" and "BOOM!" and "CRASH!"
I would like to see them switch to Discovery Channel measurements myself... distance in football fields, weight in tractor-trailer trucks, and volume in ping-pong balls.
i knew vikings went to america before colombus, but mars??? damn those vikings sure were awesome...
I think I see a birthday hat on it! mine is Capital Q
One of my favorite memories was a Xerox'ed cartoon of a lovely sylvan setting, Viking 1 parked by a meandering stream, three-eared rabbits running by, trees.... and a two-headed eagle flying away with the high-gain antenna.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Getting to Mars, though - that was easy. You load up some berserkers with drugs until they're sky high, then explode some distilled mead to launch them across the void.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And data rates in Star Trek Collections per second. Oh, sorry, that's a Slashdot measurement.
Now i know that the Vikings landed on the America's before Colubus did, but I'm not quite sure about landing on Mars.
I was actually home from school that day, and young enough to be glued to the screen as the images came in slllllowly as thin strips. Young enoug so that I seriously wondered if there would be ruins of ancient Martian cities visible on screen. Alas, no, but it's still a fond memory. Of course this makes me feel old, but hey, at least I was a kid. Wow, if you were an adult when this happened, you must be really old. Yeah. I'll keep telling myself that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's also the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. I guess we'll see a /. post on this sometime next week.
with that thim air you would nto be able to hear them whine...
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
The pictures came in, over live network TV, one vertical line at a time. From left to right it took several minutes, as I recall it, maybe longer. No image from the planet's surface had ever been seen before. And you just knew it was going to be more interesting than the surface of the Moon. But despite the live coverage, I don't recall much public interest. Apollo and Skylab had petered out. Watergate maybe. Little unmanned dingbats going to the outer planets, and later Hubble, seemed to get more antention. But I always prefered the "you were there" quality of Viking's pictures from Mars. It was obvious a person could walk around in that landscape, with enough warm clothing.
My uncle, who really got me started in engineering at age 10, built part of the guidance system. He was a good guy and I miss him.
"And lets face it, modern Scandinavians just aren't scary any more."
They aren't?!?
Why do they always mod it "flamebait" when you Speak Truth to Power?
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
You know the ads are bogus script tricks when a Google search turns up an ad that says, "Compare prices on Viking Mars Landers and save!". For NASA, it is a little too late to think about that.
Table-ized A.I.
http://home.pacbell.net/vyzamora/Mars%20Picture.jp g
d er_image.gif
Okay, seriously, this is the first image:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mars_first_lan
Caption: "This is the first image ever transmitted from the surface of Mars. It was taken only a few minutes after landing. Engineers decided to program the probe to quickly take and send an image of a footpad because it was feared that earlier Soviet probes may have sank into quicksand because they stopped transmitting shortly after touchdown. If Viking met the same fate, they wanted to know about it this time. Some speculate that the cloudiness on the left side is due to dust left over from the landing. The cameras scanned one vertical strip at a time such that by the time the scanning moved to the center of the image, the dust had allegedly settled."
Table-ized A.I.
Too bad the "Nuclear=Bad" hippies pressured NASA to not let us use nuclear power on any spacecraft capable of receiving solar power. Imagine if Pathfinder lasted a decade. The Rovers now are greatly surpassing their expectations, but too bad there's no backup nuke-powered battery to allow them to drive until 2016...
There is no way to verify if Russian probe ever landed. The landing story may have been propoganda or exaggerated. The Soviets had a repution for that. At least Viking sent photos, soil readings, etc. as evidence. If you fake photos and soil chemistry then you could be in deep doodoo when another nation lands and finds something completely different.
Plus, the Soviets tended to use a shotgun approach where they kept sending in volume until something worked. This is kind of cheating in a way. Actually, the Soviets got a little too bold and over-engineered in some cases. One (failed) Mars lander had a micro-rover on a teather. If they kept it simple and simply returned images, they could have sent even more (smaller) probes and had a higher chance of success with evidence to show for it.
Why build a micro-rover when you even have multiple problems just plain landing? For example just put simple probes on big parachutes and let them thunk down with a wire-mess bumper instead of having intricate, timed retro-rockets. (This is sort of what the european Hyugens did, although Titan's atmosphere is thick so only needed a small chute.)
Table-ized A.I.
Correction: "wire-mess" should be "wire-mesh". (Although it may be a mess after landing.)
Table-ized A.I.
>Like the Pathfinder rovers that followed in 1997, Viking was expected to last but a short time -- only three months -- but instead continued to gather and return data for six years."
Right, because someone goes out at night and wipes the dust off the solar panels.
humanity's you idiot. When will you people learn!
Aw, c'mon. At least give him a "funny" mod!
C'mon, look at the pictures! It's obvious that it landed somewhere on Earth...
(Explanation--at least in regards to the PathFinder pictures--is here.)
If by scary you mean pathetic then yes they are 'scary'.
RTGs really make more sense for missions where you're reasonably sure the hardware will last 10+ years and solar panels are not an option.
Read this about the true colour of Mars:
http://mars-news.de/color/blue.html
"The orbiter was successful, but the lander, which touched down on 12/02/1971 at 45 South, 158 West, only worked for 20 seconds and returned no data."
or
"A lander mission in which contact was lost with the lander as it was descending to the surface. Some useful atmospheric data was returned during the descent"
I don't think the point was really to just merely litter the Martian soil with some space debris. Viking 1 successfully landed and returned images and data for 6 years. Even if that were only 6 months... no, even if that were only 6 days... no, even if that were only 6 hours... no, even if that were only 6 minutes it would have been quite a bit more data than the indiscernible image fragment returned by Mars 3 in its short 20 second life on the surface.
I think it's completely fair to call Viking 1 a complete success just as Mars 3 without returning a single piece of usable data can be considered a complete failure. In my book that makes Viking first.
up Greenland, and then down Labrador, at least that's what Jared Diamond in Collapse indicates, based on archeological evidence.
Had they sailed straight across to Newfoundland, logistics would have been much easier, and their North American colony might have survived. We'd all be speaking a Scandinavian language, and having lots of sex with blonde haired blue eyed women.
the viking project detected microbial life on Mars in the 70's. I remember. I was a paperboy then and the news made front
page on the Standard times Newspaper. The news was later retracted, but I do believe that microbial life was detected on Mars
in the 70s.
...Mars probes you! (for 6 years)
ian
the viking project detected microbial life on Mars in the 70's. I remember. I was a paperboy then and the news made front
page on the Standard times Newspaper. The news was later retracted, but I do believe that microbial life was detected on Mars
in the 70s.
The experiments are generally considered "inconclusive". Although some of the tests did come back "positive", Many have found ways that soil chemistry could have created similar results. Interesting is the "cycadic rythms" (spelling?) that were detected decades later in lander data. Earth microbes have an internal clock system that allows them to change metabolism based on the time of day. The results suggested that some of these were in the Mars soil. But other variables are hard to rule out. The controversy continues...
Table-ized A.I.
It's also about the 1000th anniversary of the Vikings landing in Nova Scotia!