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)."

Comments

Opportunity

[The Rizz]

until the Opportunity rover finally beat it out in 2010 (and that little trooper is still going, by the way).

Obligatory XKCD link.

First to achieve soft landing? really?

[OzPeter]

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.

Mars is bad luck for Russia

[dunkelfalke]

Every probe they've ever tried to send there failed. Their Venus program was much more successful.

funding the lander.

[goombah99]

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.