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How Viking 1 Won the Martian Space Race
derekmead writes: NASA launched the Viking 1 spacecraft to Mars forty years ago. The probe was the first to achieve a soft landing on the planet, providing the first images and data from Mars. Politically the Viking 1 success was a huge win for the U.S. against the competing Soviet space program. Motherboard reports: "Viking 1 went on to become one of the most productive landers ever deployed on Mars, operating for 2,307 days before it finally shut down on November 13, 1982. It held the record for the longest Martian surface mission for decades, until the Opportunity rover finally beat it out in 2010 (and that little trooper is still going, by the way)."
Obligatory XKCD link.
To keep slashdot tradition going:
https://xkcd.com/695/
https://xkcd.com/1504/
Is of course Opportunity?
Was there a purpose of this white?
Of which 2306 were "Bored now!"
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I suppose then that the USSR's Mars 3 explorer in 1971 must be a figment of my imagination.
With a summary that bad I can't even be bothered to red TFS.
And when you look at List of Solar System probes there is a good deal of red in a whole lotta space probes.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Every probe they've ever tried to send there failed. Their Venus program was much more successful.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Is that you have to want to win. Not be friends, not be liked by everyone, but just simply win.
If a reader sees a story with the title "HOW something was done", they would expect the story to explain HOW that thing was done, not merely told that it was done, as the links here do.
to make us look better, and the Russians worse. Slashdot is turning into some stinky pro-American propaganda site, it seems.
Politically the Viking 1 success was a huge win for the U.S. against the competing Soviet space program.
I always thought it was kind of a "gentleman's agreement", we went to Mars and the Russians went to Venus. Why bring politics into it. The Russians have physically landed on Venus and no one else has even come close, so can they claim the same "political victory"?
It is important that we always believe that there are competitors, enemies and evildoers surrounding us. Without this belief, we might shut down the worldwide military industrial complex that pays for the re-election campaigns of our leaders.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Had a hunt starting on Wikipedia but would love a detailed guide to these early automated landers and control systems they used. Any out there or good books.
The viking mission was only funded for about 60 days of data collection. Yet the data kept flowing for years. Somehow they managed to keep the monitoring stations open to capture and archive the data. But it just was spooled onto magnetic tapes and stored on shelves. Years later I came along as a summer student and manually loaded the tapes one by one and read them onto a disk, and was the first person ever to know and analyze the multi-year weather data sets. Virtually every other nasa mission has the same budget profile of expecting early failure so not budgeting in the costs of maintaining the mission. No doubt it's a good strategy if they feel to be able to come back and ask for more, but as my experience shows sometimes that doesn't work and you don't get the extra funding. Also in hindsight, given the unknown local boulder field where one of them landed, there was a low probability of a successful landing, so maybe someone figured 60days was the average lifespan given the high infant mortality of landers.
When the Landers eventually died no one was sure why. It was thought maybe a bad instruction put them into a state that drained batteries or something. At that time James Tillman (U.W.) asked for a small 5K budget to put together a manual that would detail the RS232-like external connectors on the lander and explain how to repower and and communicate with the device from the outside--- should anyone ever happen to go there in the future and be physically present it would be easy to turn it back on. But that was never funded.
The landers themselves were built to specs that no subsequent mission has used. In particular they were worried about sterilizing the lander of all earth living material so it was baked at such a high temperature most conventional electronic materials (at the time) would have failed. For example, The data collected was cached on tape while it was out of sight of the satellite data link to earth. But conventional ferric oxide tapes would have melted in the sterilization process, so they took a page from Hitler's scientists who pioneered magnetic recording on magnetic stainless steel tapes. Radiation damage to integrated electronics in satellites was a big problem at the time, and I'm not sure why that's different now, but in any case they decided to use core memory rather than chip memory. (hence the term "core dump" for all you youngsters). Only this wasn't your grandmother's knitting style core memory but rather the cores were applied by evaporating the magnetic material onto the wires allowing a tight radiation impervious memory mesh to be synthesized. The wind and temperature sensor had no moving parts. Instead it consisted of three temperature sensors mounted on short poles at right angles to each other, and a hot wire mounted on a pole diagonal to all three. When the wind blew the thin martian atmosphere it would blow the heated air over the temperature pickups differently and from there one can solve the inverse problem of pressure (density), temperature, and wind speed and direction.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I see a lot of comments here about the term "winning" being jingoist or otherwise Soviet bashing. In this day and age of infinite nuance one can see why avoiding terms that imply superiority or seem revisionist depending on your subjective interpretation is politically correct. However, At the time of the great space race, the politically correct way of looking at things was in terms of "winning". The moon was a race. Part of the race was about building booster rockets that would be useful for ICBMs. But another was the race for mindshare in world where both russia/soviet and the US thought in terms of spreading communism. As time wore on, the space race also became a way for the US and Russia to releave the tensions of the proxy wars and find a new playing field in which cooperation was possible. Skylab and the soviet counterpart were plans for which guests from each country might be welcomed on board. But each country wanted to "win" in terms of being the host not the guest. This later paved the way for more cooperation with the international space station. bit by bit, then sportsmanship in space became a route to ties, cooperations and maybe trust, which helped with the START ballistic missile limitation treaties. So there's really nothing wrong with calling this "winning" as that was the terms of this sporting conquest of space was in fact waged under. It was a race and doing it better than the other guy was the goal. THe early russian firsts with sputnik and laika and the crash landings on venus and the moon and mars showed it was a race. The US response was to do everything better rather than be the also ran in same category of accomplishment. Thus it's not unfair to chest thump that the US did achieve more successful and elaborate missions even if the Soviets got somewhere first. It was about winning. But the off earth sporting contest created some cooperative sportsmanship too. THese days people think that contests create contention and the opposite, altruistic cooperation, is the morally superior route to reliving contention but the space race showed that cooperation can emerge out of contests too.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I was in college at CWRU when Viking was launched, and still there when it landed. After launch and during transit, the engineering teams are pretty much on hiatus, so some go on the talk circuit. I went to see one of the Viking engineers came to the Wade Museum at the CWRU campus to give a talk on the design and engineering of the lander.
Later, after Viking had had its first peeks at Mars, Carl Sagan went on tour with the findings. I went and saw the presentation on campus at the Amasa Stone Chapel.
More recently, after Spirit and Opportunity had given their first batch of results, one of the scientists was touring a book (at least partly a picture book) of the results, and came to the UVM campus. Saw that, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What is the radiation level at 53km over Venus?
Pretty reasonable-- at that level, you're still underneath about 10 tons/m2 of shielding by atmosphere
And fiction aside, why would someone want to colonize a floating death trap? Why not colonize the surface of the ocean for 1 billionth the price and risk?
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Politically the Viking 1 success was a huge win for the U.S. against the competing Soviet space program.
I always thought it was kind of a "gentleman's agreement", we went to Mars and the Russians went to Venus.
Nope. The Russians sent probes to both planets. it just happened that their Mars probes failed, and their Venus probes (after the first handful) mostly succeeded.
Why bring politics into it. The Russians have physically landed on Venus and no one else has even come close,
Two of the NASA Pioneer atmospheric probes landed on the surface, even though landiing was not a mission objective. One of them continued to transmit after landing, so no, the Russian are not the only ones to successfully land on the surface of Venus.
so can they claim the same "political victory"?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Actually, the first spacecraft to be launched was Viking II. Viking I's battery was depleted during a pre-launch test because there was no provision made in the lander software to turn the lander off. Oops! The battery couldn't be replaced in time to meet the launch window because the spacecraft would have had to be re-sterilized. So the already-sterilized and ready-to-go Viking II was substituted on the launch vehicle. Viking II had a different mission profile from Viking I, so mission I was updated into Viking II during the voyage to Mars, thereby turning it into 'Viking I'. It was a huge uplink, but it worked.
Also, re: funding - $$$ for the final days/weeks/months of data processing were literally obtained via pennies from school children.