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Space Science

Mars and the History of Antacids 58

Posted by michael from the fizz-fizz dept.
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's retrospective today on the 1976 Mars Viking mission describes the first probe to orbit another planet, and the first biology experiments based on soil sampling. Program managers maintained a dynamic 'worry list', which included a 1970's computer that opened like a wireframe book. The all-important biology experiments could not be tested prior to launch, then lightning struck the probe components (at Kennedy's Explosive Safe Area Building)."
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Mars and the History of Antacids More

Mars and the History of Antacids

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  • Why the Viking mission was accepted (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 14, 2003 @01:54PM (#6200409)
    NASA managers found a way to convince the goverment to fund this mission: they told Bush that the martians are developing weapons of mass destruction. They have reliable intelligence: a complete report from secret agent Herbert G. Wells.

  • What the heck? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Saturday June 14, 2003 @01:54PM (#6200416) Homepage
    I read the article and didn't see TUMS mentioned anywhere.
  • http://www.astrobio.net/articles/images/computer_t est.jpg

  • Check out the babe testing that computer (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 14, 2003 @02:00PM (#6200452)
    Thankfully, hairdos miniaturized along with the computers.

    • That's what you think! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Meanwhile all the hair that fell into the computer, after being struck by lightning, and the martian conditions, has grown and bred.

      Beware the Giant Hairballs of Mars!

    • Thankfully, hairdos miniaturized along with the computers.

      Maybe she touched something high voltage, but did not want to tell her supervisor, so explained it off as a new hairdoo.

      I don't think they would let people on planes these days with hair like that. You can hide a lot of WMD in there. The hairspray fumes alone would put the pilot to ZZZZ-land.

      Hmmmm. I wonder if her *other* hair is big also. A "Fro Below" perhaps?

  • very short article (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Artifex ( 18308 ) on Saturday June 14, 2003 @02:10PM (#6200501) Journal
    Nothing meatier than the summary in the body of it, either.

    History of antacids? Whatever. There's nothing especially finger-biting or stomach-churning mentioned in the text, except for a picture of a woman sticking "magnetic wires" "the size of a human hair" into an early computer with circuit boards that swing down - the "wireframe book," apparently.

    I'd have loved to have read about how difficult it was to keep materials from being contaminated with dust (shed skin flakes), etc., before launch, or how they decided to shield the circuitry from radiation, and what kinds of weight tradeoffs came up, etc.

    But the huge "problems list" section, which takes roughly a third of the article, actually doesn't detail problems, but just things like how the list was made, and how nobody would get in trouble for adding things to the list, and other yay-team filler.

    Overall, the whole thing reads like a one-sheet poster for a cheap hands-on museum display. Very disappointing.

    • Re:very short article (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It is a serialized version of a 500 page book. Not sure a single one-page mission summary in one chunk would load in your browser all at once...They say it is introductory, with no yay-team in 'not testable'

  • Is it just me (Score:3)

    by coolmacdude ( 640605 ) on Saturday June 14, 2003 @02:25PM (#6200576) Homepage Journal
    or does that picture remind you of one of the possible unpleseant results of nausea?

  • Not the first (Score:5, Informative)

    by jfoust ( 9271 ) on Saturday June 14, 2003 @03:02PM (#6200738)
    The article claims that Viking "involved the first probe to orbit another planet", but this is incorrect. Mariner 9 [nasa.gov] went into orbit around Mars in November 1971, just days ahead of the USSR's Mars 2 [nasa.gov] and Mars 3 [nasa.gov] spacecraft. There was also Mars 5 [nasa.gov] in early 1974 and Venera 9 [nasa.gov] and Venera 10 [nasa.gov], two Soviet Venus orbiters, in late 1975.

    • Re:Not the first (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Anderson accepted, to a degree, that 'one can argue that the first mission to Mars should have biological emphasis,' but the realities were 'that the biological and organic experiments were not ready when the payload was selected, are not ready now, and probably will not be ready in 1975.' First here [nasa.gov]
  • I wonder if that lady is making the first laptop or "notebook" computer.
  • Sort of gives a whole new meaning to the term "memory pages" now doesn't it?

    Especially as those "hair thin wires" are being threaded through the donut-shaped magnetic cores that made up the computer's RAM. (one donut per bit! Ain't core-memory fun?)

    Progress is the process of making yesterday's innovations obsolete.?
  • There's a really good reason for this "anonymous reader" to stay anonymous.

  • Mating and the Mars-bound hardware (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The article ends with this juicy bit of information:
    Viking orbiter l, and Viking lander capsule 1 were mated for the first time on 8 March.

    Why do they leave us in the dark? Were they able to get the orbiter and lander to sucessfully mate in captivity? Did they have twins? Where are they now?

  • Full text available on-line (Score:5, Informative)

    by starsong ( 624646 ) on Saturday June 14, 2003 @04:29PM (#6201079)
    The article's annoyingly short, but the book it references (On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet. 1958-1978) is available for free download via the web [nasa.gov]. The Top Ten problems list is in chapter 8 [nasa.gov].

    You can find a huge selection of other NASA-related books (including charts, diagrams and pictures) here [nasa.gov].

  • Its that very contrution technique shown in those pictures why memory is sometimes refered to as 'pages'.

  • Biology platform was not tested! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SysKoll ( 48967 ) on Saturday June 14, 2003 @05:00PM (#6201216)

    The one really interesting item in this otherwise mundane article is the revelation that the biology experiment platform was delivered too late to be adequately tested.

    This gives a new credibility to the scientists that are challenging the results of the Viking lander biological experiments. Basically, we cannot even be sure these instruments were performing as designed.

    So if the ESA and NASA probes send results that contradict Viking's in some way, nobody should be surprised.

    Little green men haven't been ruled out yet! -:)

    -- SysKoll

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday June 14, 2003 @06:13PM (#6201531)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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