How Viking 1 Won the Martian Space Race 53
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)."
Opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory XKCD link [xkcd.com].
funding the lander. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Winning? yes that was the goal. (Score:3)
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. B
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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.
Interesting. I'd always heard that they stopped transmitting because they were turned off because we didn't have funding to continue listening to them. Wouldn't be the first thing I was wrong about.
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 an
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That may have been the case decades ago when you were there, but you haven't been keeping up with the news - fully funded extended missions are now the norm.
The
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The simplest integrated processes use junction isolation which is susceptible to all kind of additional problems when exposed to radiation compared to integrated circuits which use dielectric isolation.
Obligatory xkcd (Score:4, Funny)
To keep slashdot tradition going:
https://xkcd.com/695/ [xkcd.com]
https://xkcd.com/1504/ [xkcd.com]
2307 days? (Score:2)
First to achieve soft landing? really? (Score:5, Informative)
I suppose then that the USSR's Mars 3 explorer [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org] there is a good deal of red in a whole lotta space probes.
Re: First to achieve soft landing? really? (Score:1)
Well, Mars 3 lasted about fifteen seconds and never transmitted anything that showed anything. The hypothesis was that it landed in a dust storm, because that's a more generous hypothesis than shitty hardware or a landing harder than what the hardware could take.
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Well you put your finger on why Mars 3 doesn't loom large in our recollection of Mars missions, but I think you're being a little harsh. As others have discovered in the years since, landing on Mars is really, really hard. There's just enough atmosphere to be a problem. Just getting something from the surface of the Earth to the surface of Mars in 1972 was an amazing achievement.
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"the first craft to ever reach Mars"
Mars 2 reached the surface 1 week earlier.
Mariner 9 reached orbit 2 1/2 weeks earlier.
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I suppose then that the USSR's Mars 3 explorer in 1971 must be a figment of my imagination.
No, but 70 lines of an ambiguous image and 14.5 seconds of transmission hardly "wins" the race to Mars. How is that really any more useful than a hard landing?
So, do you really call it a successful soft landing if it couldn't complete its mission?
I agree, the summary is bad, but the title is correct: Viking 1 won the Martian Space Race, since it actually succeeded and exceeded the mission goal: Transmitting useful information from the surface of Mars.
Re:First to achieve soft landing? really? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd say that's being pedantic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Mars 3 is BELIEVED to have soft-landed, according to the general consensus (if 20m/s = 45 mph = being dropped from a 6-story building here on Earth... is "soft" but you get my point) but failed to return any meaningful data. It quit after 20 seconds just sending a garbled partial picture that can't even be interpreted to find a horizon.
It's just as likely that the lander crashed, and some of it managed to still barely function for 20 seconds.
In any case, even the SOVIETS would likely agree that the Viking 1 was the first successful Mars lander.
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There was a known dust storm near the area of the landing. Some speculate the winds pulled at the parachute after landing and yanked the probe over.
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Sure, there's a "whole lotta red" if you just look... and you're the kind who gives out blue ribbons for just trying. In reality, if you actually read rather than just comparing the visual count of flags, a lot of those "red" probes were complete failures.
And that's the story of Soviet era space exploration in a nutshell - they achieved some impressive firsts, but they were also virtually completely
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I suppose then that the USSR's Mars 3 explorer [wikipedia.org] in 1971 must be a figment of my imagination.
YOU GODDAMNED COMMIE! How DARE you talk about anything but *American* firsts in space?!? Haven't you watched any American-made documentary on that era? Only NASA did anything in the space race. The Commies only launched a satellite, and some other vague stuff maybe that spawned AMERICA to develop the GREATEST, BIGGEST DICK SPACE PROGRAM EVER and plant a giant fuck-you flag on the moon!!
America, fuck yeah!
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To be fair, Mars 3 sent us this [wikipedia.org] and then died. I would not call it a successful space mission.
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Jupiter was invented by a little old lady from Ekaterinburg.
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Nazi rocket scientists put americans on the moon. they did indeed win the space race
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I think the soviet venus landings are way more fucking impressive than any other planetary landing, that's the most brutal environment on any rocky planet in our solar system
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I suppose then that the USSR's Mars 3 explorer [wikipedia.org] in 1971 must be a figment of my imagination.
I would think that it's reasonable to require that the probe transmit at least one image from the surface before saying that it's successful. Landing and immediately failing is not really a success.
Mars is bad luck for Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
Every probe they've ever tried to send there failed. Their Venus program was much more successful.
Re:Mars is bad luck for Russia (Score:4, Interesting)
I really don't get the lack of interest in Venus, almost as much as I don't get the obsession with Mars. I mean, Venus is basically Earth's evil twin. And while we're getting to understand Mars quite well, we have no idea why Venus ended up so different from us. It's kind of a big deal and huge outstanding question. We also understand so little about its surface and the processes that are active there today.
I know, I know, people obsess over Mars rather than Venus because of the idea that people will go colonize Mars but not Venus, so that makes Mars cooler. But... really? Mars has almost no atmosphere providing radiation protection, a low solar constant, planetwide storms of electrostatic dust, longer orbit transfers, more difficult capture, frigid temperatures, and low gravity that human bodies may or may not tolerate well for prolonged periods of time.
Now, compared to the surface of Venus, Mars is positively a paradise. But nobody would send manned missions to the surface of Venus; they'd send them to the Venusian cloudtops at around 53km. A colony there would involve airships and floating cities, and people could walk outside in nearly Earth gravity in shirtsleeves at Denver pressures / Phoenix temperatures so long as they wore goggles and a breathing mask. Basically, it'd be like something straight out of a steampunk novel.
There is sulfuric acid, but it's not as concentrated as most people envision - it's more like living downwind of a volcano. The concentration of sulfuric acid (and also, less talked about, carbon monoxide) will require eye protection but should probably not require skin protection. One obviously, as mentioned, needs a mask. The atmosphere provides an abundant source of easily acquired carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur - much more easily acquired than on Mars. It also provides smaller amounts of argon, helium, neon, chlorine, and fluorine at the same livable altitudes. Phosphorus can be found in the clouds at lower altitudes (below 33km) as phosphoric acid and phosphorus anhydride. So you have your basic building blocks for a full-featured petrochemical industry, aka, what you need to keep your craft aloft and make new ones, make and repair suits, etc. And even regular Earth air is a lifting gas on Venus. You also have all of the basic requirements for life (CHONP). It might even be possible to breed plants that can be grown outdoors on Venus at those altitudes - gardens dangling off of the bottom of floating cities. How freaking steampunk is that?
Obviously you're not going to have people walking on the Venusian surface. But here's where you get to the other issue, that putting humans on Venus is also more purposeful than on Mars. Think of robotic Venusian landers. At the surface, there's A) little light to provide solar power, B) you'd fry almost any known type of solar power source, C) and thermal power sources like RTG are given an incredibly difficult job due to the high ambient temperature. Also, the easiest way to cool a craft - simply having a coolant reservoir onboard - only gives you limited time at the surface. Having scientific instruments not get destroyed in the conditions at the surface is greatly challenging. And if you want to do sample return, you need "lightweight", which something designed to tolerate Venusian surface conditions most definitely won't be.
Basically, to research the Venusian surface well, you pretty much need a floating base of some kind, for submarine-like diving airships to stop at between surface dives. There they'd be able to recharge their batteries, offload samples, have their coolant swapped out or chilled, etc. The floating bases either examine samples there and/or function as a staging point for an ascent stage for return. Now, there's no fundamental requirement that such bases be manned. But at least you need something floating there, which makes it much easier to simply work humans into the mix. Plus, since each diver would have very limited time
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Venus [Re:Mars is bad luck for Russia] (Score:2)
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... [nasa.gov]
Re:Mars is bad luck for Russia (Score:4, Interesting)
The worst radiation event known in history, a 775 AD event, would cause a dose of 0,09 gray [lewisdartnell.com] over 20 hours - and that's at the top of the "habitable zone", 62km. Based on on Fig. 6, at 53km the dose would be something like 1e-6 to 1e-4 Gy. Radiation sickness requires a whole body dose of over 2 gray [umich.edu]. So not even close. The constant GCR flux looks to be about 1e-7Gy/20h, or about 0,00438 Gy/yr.
Think of it this way: Venus's atmospheric shielding depth at Denver air pressures is basically roughly the same as Earth's at Denver; Mars's thin atmosphere provides little shielding. Neither Venus nor Mars have magnetic fields, so they're both at the same disadvantage - but Venus still has its thick atmospheric shielding. The only disadvantage Venus has to Mars is being closer to the sun - but that's completely overwhelmed by its significant advantage in terms of atmospheric shielding (and the distance to the sun has no effect on GCR).
As to why one would colonize Venus, it's the same reasons one would want to colonize Mars: to become a multi-planet spacefaring civilization. It also, as mentioned, offers some benefits in terms of scientific research, more than sending humans to Mars does. And if Venus's unusual extreme surface environment has perchance provided concentrations of rare, valuable minerals, it could potentially be useful for mining for export, which would benefit from having humans on-site for low latency operations and maintenance.
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A multi-planet civilization needs to be able to build things from local resources. The raw materials on Mars are a lot easier to access than on Venus.
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It's almost like you didn't even read my original post.
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I really don't get the lack of interest in Venus, almost as much as I don't get the obsession with Mars.
It is simple - the same thing that determines whether an item makes the evening news: pictures.
Long ago, we could look at mars through a telescope, while Venus was just a dull blob of cloud.
Now we have many amazing images of Mars form orbiters and rovers, while for Venus there are a few foggy lander photos and computer-generated landscapes.
So ? HOW did it win the Martian space race ? (Score:1)
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.
Venera and Pioneer [Re:US vs THEM in space is...] (Score:2)
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 [nasa.gov] 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"?
perceived enemy (Score:2)
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.
How did they do soft landing with tech at time? (Score:1)
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.
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Back in the day... (Score:2)
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.
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