30th Anniversary of Viking Landing on Mars 201
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."
Humans? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Humans? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Humans? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Humans? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Humans? (Score:2)
Re:Humans? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Humans? (Score:2)
Re:Humans? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Humans? (Score:2)
Oh, and see if you can spot Beagle2 to use it as a crisp bowl (Potatoe chips to North Americans)
Re:Humans? (Score:2, Funny)
Only to Dan Quayle.
Re:Humans? (Score:2)
Re:Humans? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Humans? (Score:2)
Re:You obvioulsy don't have kids. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Humans? (Score:2)
Re:Humans? (Score:2, Funny)
Built to last (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:Built to last (Score:3, Informative)
And I've got to ask, what do you do to your computers that kills them in three months? Take em swimming?
Re:Built to last (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Built to last (Score:3, Funny)
it's still a tossup as to the rovers staying
alive past the Vista release date.
I'm siding with the rovers, even if Vista
doesn't become stable until 2010.
Re:Built to last (Score:3, Funny)
vikings landed on mars? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:vikings landed on mars? (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, no. (Score:3, Insightful)
Getting to Mars, though - that was easy. You load up some berserkers with drugs until they're sky high, then explode some distilled mead to launch them across the void.
Re:vikings landed on mars? (Score:2)
Re:vikings landed on mars? (Score:2)
One funny post- Kudos!
Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:2)
The numerical aspect means nothing.
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:2)
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:2, Funny)
Insightful? WTF mods?
Funny? Maybe.
Delightfully sarcastic? Sure.
Inisghtful?
It's even funnier, because I'll be modded down as Troll or Flamebait...
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:2)
I see they managed to make you forget their original intent for the moon invasion: to rid it of Green Cheese of Destruction. When it was discovered there was no GCD on the moon, it was claimed that it must have been moved to Mars prior to the invasion, hence the Viking missions seven years later.
Re:Also the anniversery of the 1st lunar landing (Score:3, Insightful)
Enough with the americocentrism (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
It is. The Russions were there first. Doesn't matter how many seconds later their craft died. See here [astrodigital.org] 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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:2)
Re:Russian probe hard to verify (Score:5, Informative)
As for "little too bold", read about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod [wikipedia.org] missons.
Besides, we've managed (I'm a Russian) a landing on Venus.
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Informative)
I think that they did get several to Venus though although the extreme conditions of Venus meant that relatively little data was returned. Unfortunately the best Russian lander managed to survive for just a couple of hours, and I belive that a freak accident prevented its main experiment from working. It was intended to sample the soil and analyse its makeup, sadly the heat shield appears to have fallen off under the scope and prevented i
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Informative)
Venus
Temps: 900+ degree
Pressures: Don't have figures..but it will definitely make your ears pop
Weather: It rains sulfuric Acid
Venus is as close to literal Hell as you can get (without trying to land on the sun). I want to see NASA design a craft to land on VENUS.
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Interesting)
Mars, however, we might actually want to go there.
Besides, if you want a real technical challenge, lets land a navigable rover on Jupiter. I mean, one that doesn't automatically sink to it's rocky core. Venus is a cakewalk.
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:2)
If the textbook or the teacher's guide actually said that, then I think your cry of "revisionism" is justified. Otherwise, it would seem that it's most likely that either your cousin misheard or misrememebred, or the teacher is a dumbass.
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:2)
As far as I'm aware of, the Russians bet us in every space race contest. If we really wanted to be honest in our history books, we'd have the names of Russians as the First Humans doing X in space. A text book like that wouldn't sell in the US. It might sell in Europe, India, China, or Japan. I'd
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Informative)
Sally Kristen Ride (born May 26, 1951) is a former astronaut and became the first American woman to reach outer space, in 1983. She was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova (1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (1982).
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
Now the stuff about Sally Ride, well, forget it. Facts are facts. Although on second thought that statement has a lot of truthiness about it.
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Informative)
Everywhere I look (even on nasa's website) the first woman in space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. You can google it yourself or if you are lazy simply look here http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos _who_level2/tereshkova.html [nasa.gov]
The only posible conclusion I can come to as to where you got your quote is the wikipedia article for Sall
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Informative)
Here: http://www.astronautix.com/articles/womspace.htm [astronautix.com]
Go thou and read, Read, READ.
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:2)
-scott
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:2)
-Eric
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Enough with the americocentrism (Score:3, Informative)
What would Lenin do? Order a few thousand dissenters to be executed and cause a small famine by trying to collectivize the farms, then give up and reintroduce market farming under a New Economic Program. (To actually pull off collectivization required someone with more stomach for mass famine and mass murder--Stalin.)
Or, in other words:
Oops (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oops (Score:2)
However, in this case Slashdot is partially correct. Mars Pathfinder carried the Sojourner Rover, which according to the robot hall of fame [robothalloffame.org]:
Re:Oops (Score:2)
Re:Oops (Score:2)
Dont forget (Score:5, Insightful)
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html [nasa.gov]
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 (Score:2)
After all, the Titan III which launched the Viking had a fueled pad weight of around (based on Wikipedia's mass figures) 384,241 kg; the scientific payload of the lander, which when you get right down to it is the sole purpose for the res
Re:Dont forget (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Dont forget (Score:2)
I couldn't possibly agree more - it sickens me, society is so wasteful compared to just 15 years ago when I was a boy.
Transport vehicle (Score:2, Funny)
"...bloody Vikings..." -Monty Python
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Modern Scandanavians (Score:2)
Re:Transport vehicle (Score:3, Funny)
SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM! Wonderful SPAM!
Note: SPAM (all caps) is a trademark of Hormel.
OK, I feel old now. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OK, I feel old now. (Score:2)
Re:OK, I feel old now. (Score:2)
When I refer to NASA as "beaurocratic", I'm not talking about the engineers. I have tons of respect for the guys and gals "in the trenches" at NASA. They are the reason I believe that NASA could accomplish so much more - if it weren't for the beaurocracy above them.
Obviously some ma
NSIWT (Score:4, Funny)
One of my favorite memories was a Xerox'ed cartoon of a lovely sylvan setting, Viking 1 parked by a meandering stream, three-eared rabbits running by, trees.... and a two-headed eagle flying away with the high-gain antenna.
Unforgettable (Score:3, Interesting)
I was actually home from school that day, and young enough to be glued to the screen as the images came in slllllowly as thin strips. Young enoug so that I seriously wondered if there would be ruins of ancient Martian cities visible on screen. Alas, no, but it's still a fond memory. Of course this makes me feel old, but hey, at least I was a kid. Wow, if you were an adult when this happened, you must be really old. Yeah. I'll keep telling myself that.
Re:Unforgettable (Score:3, Interesting)
line by line (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:line by line (Score:2)
The lateest rover pics have brought back that same spellbinding feeling.
Amazing accomplishments, and I feel good being a witness for them.
Inspirational stuff!
Re:line by line (Score:2, Funny)
Re:line by line (Score:3, Funny)
No, that only happens in a vacuum. That is, the total intellectual vacuum of movie physics, not an actual physical vacuum.
Gotta love Google Ads (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gotta love Google Ads (Score:2)
Why, just the other day I got an offer from the President of Nigeria himself offering me several used Viking Mars Landers at a bargain price. I just need to post a deposit, and he'll sell me several of those relics from the Nigerian Space Program. I've been thinking about it, but I think I will take the rival offer of pristine, still-in-box Mars Global Surveyors from China instead...
Re:Gotta love Google Ads (Score:2)
First picture! (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, seriously, this is the first image:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mars_first_lan
Caption: "This is the first image ever transmitted from the surface of Mars. It was taken only a few minutes after landing. Engineers decided to program the probe to quickly take and send an image of a footpad because it was feared that earlier Soviet probes may have sank into quicksand because they stopped transmitting shortly after touchdown. If Viking met the same fate, they wanted to know about it this time. Some speculate that the cloudiness on the left side is due to dust left over from the landing. The cameras scanned one vertical strip at a time such that by the time the scanning moved to the center of the image, the dust had allegedly settled."
Re:First picture! (Score:2)
We need more nuke-powered explorers... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We need more nuke-powered explorers... (Score:2, Informative)
From wikipwedia
It must be bad how the world isn't what you think it is. Read some Hume please
ciao
I'm not sure it's that big a loss (Score:2)
RTGs really make more sense for missions where you're reasonably sure the hardware will last 10+ years and solar panels are not an option.
Re:I'm not sure it's that big a loss (Score:2)
Except that right now, Spirit is parked on a South-facing slope, not moving due to lack of power. If solar power is inadequate to power a roving rover through Martian winter right near the equator, imagine how inadequate it would be near the poles. Yes, the rovers weren't intended to survive the winter, let alone rove during the winter,
dust removal (Score:2, Funny)
Right, because someone goes out at night and wipes the dust off the solar panels.
Re:dust removal (Score:5, Informative)
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 [hiwaay.net], right at the bottom of the page.
Revisionist history, indeed.
I was a paper boy when viking1 & 2 landed.. an (Score:2)
page on the Standard times Newspaper. The news was later retracted, but I do believe that microbial life was detected on Mars
in the 70s.
Re:Moon? (Score:2)
Re:Imagine how NASA will do when they go metric! (Score:3, Funny)
I would like to see them switch to Discovery Channel measurements myself... distance in football fields, weight in tractor-trailer trucks, and volume in ping-pong balls.
Re:So then ... (Score:2)
Re:They faked that one (Score:2)
C'mon, look at the pictures! It's obvious that it landed somewhere on Earth... [mars-news.de]
(Explanation--at least in regards to the PathFinder pictures--is here. [discover.com])