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."

Comments

Humans?

[WinEveryGame]

So, when will humans get there?

Re:Humans?

[0racle]

Why? Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.

Re:Humans?

[lottameez]

In fact, it's cold as hell.

Re:Humans?

[nickheart]

And there's no one there to raise them, if you did.

Re:Humans?

[nizo]

Yeah but the first person there gets a free coffee table (viking lander) worth one billion dollars and a free footstool (mars rover) worth 300 million.

Built to last

[Joebert]

Viking was expected to last but a short time -- only three months -- but instead continued to gather and return data for six years

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.

vikings landed on mars?

[RelliK]

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.

Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing

[laing]

July 20th, 1969 was the first manned lunar landing. To me, this is a more significant anniversary than Viking.

Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing

[Apraxhren]

Pssh that wasn't even real!

Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing

[afaik_ianal]

I have to wonder though if there might be some kind of ulterior motive going on with it

To get the funding, NASA had to tell congress that it was actually an invasion mission in which the Lunarian race would be freed from the evil Man in the Moon.

Enough with the americocentrism

[Saven Marek]

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?

Re:Enough with the americocentrism

[CaptainCarrot]

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.

Re:Enough with the americocentrism

[Waffle Iron]

So why is this, when russians sent many probes to mars beforehand?

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.

Re:Enough with the americocentrism

[windowpain]

I really don't think it's revisionism. I think it's ignorance. For the last couple of decades teaching has attracted more and more undergrads well below the 50th percentile in their graduating classes. I've known and spoken with a number of teachers. Their ignorance is blood-curdling.

Re:Enough with the americocentrism

[tsa]

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.

Re:Enough with the americocentrism

[Saven Marek]

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.

Except the article summary says "The solar system had welcomed its first interplanetary visitor from Earth" which is also completely wrong, as the USSR had reached venus in 1970, and venus is still part of the solar system. It landed safely, and sent back data. Venera 7, 8, 9 and 10 all landed on venus and sent back data before viking touched down on mars.

Oops

[Graymalkin]

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.

Dont forget

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Dont forget

[NormalVisual]

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.

Mod parent down

[CRCulver]

So if you think some other woman got into space first, put up or shutup, She was and she was american.

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.

Gotta love Google Ads

[Tablizer]

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.

Re:Russian probe hard to verify

[Cyberax]

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.

Re:dust removal

[ColaMan]

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.