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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."
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.
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.
From wikipedia's page on Sally Ride: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Ride
Sally Kristen Ride (born May 26, 1951) is a former astronaut and became the first American woman to reach outer space, in 1983. She was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982).
Sally Ride indeed "was American" but she wasn't the first woman in space. That would be Valentina Tereshkova, who orbited the earth 20 years earlier. Sally Ride wasn't the second woman either. That was Svetlana Savitskaya, a year prior. Ride was in fact the third woman in space, albeit the first American woman.
It is, however, true that no Soviet probes successfully landed on Mars. It's not true that they never launched. They launched 9 of them. Two failed to reach Earth orbit, two failed while in Earth orbit, one was lost en route, one missed. One made it into Martian orbit and sent back a number of images before failing. One lander crashed on the surface, the next and last separated early and didn't encounter the surface at all. The Viking missions were the first probes to successfully land on the planet and return data.
And the brethren went away edified.
I would like to see your source for Sally Kristen Ride (born May 26, 1951) is a former astronaut and became the first woman to reach outer space, in 1983.s _who_level2/tereshkova.html
Everywhere I look (even on nasa's website) the first woman in space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. You can google it yourself or if you are lazy simply look here http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/who
The only posible conclusion I can come to as to where you got your quote is the wikipedia article for Sally Ride but even they got it right
Sally Kristen Ride (born May 26, 1951) is a former astronaut and became the first American woman to reach outer space, in 1983.
Nice how that one little word got left out of your quote.
However, all of them crashed except for Mars 3, which sent data from the surface for a total of 20 seconds before permanently dying. You may be technically correct, but they didn't achieve anything meaningful on the surface before the Viking probes. (As far as flyby missions, both countries had sent prior probes.) Therefore, the article summary really isn't the affront to history that you make it out to be.
Here: http://www.astronautix.com/articles/womspace.htm
Go thou and read, Read, READ.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
Also, Viking wasn't even the first probe to land on a planet. The Russians put a probe on Venus, and it did manage to transmit data before being destroyed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_7
Therefore, the article summary really isn't the affront to history that you make it out to be.
It is. The Russions were there first. Doesn't matter how many seconds later their craft died. See here for a nice overview of missions to Mars. Took me a while to find it since NASA doesn't talk about anyone else but themselves... Not exactly rewriting history but fishy nonetheless.
-- Cheers!
Mars 3 landed in the middle of a dust storm so it was literally blown away, that's why it only transmitted for 20 seconds.
As for "little too bold", read about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod missons.
Besides, we've managed (I'm a Russian) a landing on Venus.
the scientific payload of the lander, which when you get right down to it is the sole purpose for the rest of the stuff existing, was 91 kg
That's kind of a misleading statement - the payload within the lander was 91 kg, but that's totally discounting the scientific value of the orbiter, and while obviously the lander existed only as a platform for the science, I wouldn't have considered it "disposable" in the same sense that the launch vehicle was. On the other hand, without the orbiters we probably would never have heard the name "Richard Hoagland" either, so I guess there's balance in all things.
Practically, boosting 3500+ kg to escape velocity and successfully sending it a distance of over 200 million miles in 10 months using a grand total of less than 381K kg isn't inefficient by any existing earth-bound measurement. To drive the same distance in a car would require 30 million pounds in fuel alone, and that assumes the car is getting better gas mileage than most.
Finally, the launch vehicle itself accounted for a very small portion of the total cost of the Viking program, and was nowhere near a "multi-billion dollar" expenditure. Even today, the heaviest variant of the Atlas V (961K kg, and *much* more powerful than the Titan III-Centaur that took the Vikings up) costs about $130 million per launch. Hell, even the Shuttle is substantially less than a billion per launch. The only launch vehicle that I can think of that remotely qualifies on that level of cost is the Saturn V, but that's an entirely different beast altogether, and was very expensive mostly because of the very small number of vehicles that were built. That wasn't the case with the Titan III.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Until some dumbass sent a wrong command to the viking lander and shut it off permanently.
Not a good thing to put on your resume.
"Desk jockey in extended viking science mission, until I completely screwed myself out of a job."
Funny, all the NASA references these days seem to edit that little bit of info out, and merely say that it was shut off due to impending battery failure. Other sources - and my memory suggest otherwise.
Ah! Here's a reference from the RISKS digest Volume 3, Issue 60 - 1986. (A digest that is still running today, and is a highly insightful window into how technology screwups mess with daily life.)
Ground control lost contact with Viking 1, apparently due to a
software change transmitted to the lander that was accidentally
overlaid upon some mission-critical software already in the lander's
computer. (Bruce Smith, "JPL Tries to Revive Link with Viking 1",
@ux(Aviation Week and Space Technology), April 4, 1983, Volume
118(14), page 16.)
A scanned image of the mentioned article, right at the bottom of the page.
Revisionist history, indeed.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.