I'm looking for resources that give a sol by sol account of lander activities.

Example (in German):

Sol 1

Are there any English websites like this?

Cody, there're some web-resources I'll take a look to that later, for the moment I can just recommend You my weblog with my collection of Mars-exploration related literature:
Interested in buying some of those books, let me know and I'll point You to resources for these
http://mars-literature.skynetblogs.be/

For those building a VIKING scale model there's:
http://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/models/realspace/viking.html

a good resource

I don't think there is any site like that, but it would be a great contribution... if somebody wanted to devote their lives to it! And Pathfinder/Sojourner as well.

This also makes me think... that if some of our great mappers were so inclined, the Viking 1 and 2 pans could be reprojected into polar and vertical forms. I did some polars but they need re-doing at high resolution. Now I remember I said I would do that ages ago for one of our occasional posters, and I completely forgot to do it. Better get to it!

Phil

Here's another Viking Lander resource website ... it's about the third actual 'Flight' lander which was preserved at Washington University:

http://www-k12.atmos.washington.edu/k12/LF..._vcf/node1.html

Phil,
That would indeed be great I guess a day-by-day ( sol-by-sol ) account of the VIKING landers could be done in some way by using the NASA Viking Lander Imaging catalogs.
Buth then again it would be a heavy job as Viking Lander 1 functioned untill November 1982 ...
To be continued...

If anyone is looking for models of unmanned spacecraft, and isn't a hard-core model-maker, then try eBay. If you search for 'Takara Viking Lander' you'll find a lovely little semi-assembled model - even the most fumble-fingered can finish it, as it's 99% done for you! In the same series are such items as as Voyager, Lunokhod, Ranger, Mars-3, and Sputnik-1. A bit of creative searching will also throw up similar models of manned vehicles.

If you're lucky you may even find the 1/32 MER diecast, too!

Bob Shaw

I don't know a book that gives a day by day account of the Viking landers. However, this book does give an excellent detailed review of the Viking life experiments:

The search for life on Mars : evolution of an idea.
Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.
New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, c1980.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0030461669/


- Bob Clark

OK. I have one (sorry in French, but technical terms are mostly the same) : it was published inside a compilation I issued in 2000 from my personal archives and work done with JPL. It still serves some NASA friends as historical reference.
Please, tell me how I can paste a word document with rows and columns...

You could try exporting the Word document to a format some other program will read and see if that program handles copying and pasting tables better.

Offhand it might work to export it to .HTML and load it in IE or Firefox or Opera, which I seem to recall all handle tables well.. and yeah, I've tried to copy and paste tables in Word myself, and it's odd that Microsoft didn't make it actually work (the same seems to apply to Excel, from what I vaguely remember).

Thanks Mike !
OK, so I try the simplest mean : here is the Word document : it's not a day-to-day account, but the synthesis of dates of importance for the Viking mission on Mars (orbiters & landers).
Enjoy !

Postflight simulation of parachute deployment dynamics of Viking qualification flight tests

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntr..._1973022109.pdf

This is a follow-up from post number 4:

A circular version of a Viking 1 panorama. But this is a special version: I took the Camera 1 and Camera 2 pans, using Camera 2 to fill the gap in the Camera 1 pan, but went further by using parts of the Camera 2 pan to patch over any part of the spacecraft which was blocking the horizon in the Camera 1 pan. Result - a completely unobstructed 360 degree horizon. I will post other versions of this later.

DD - I'll get a full res version to you.

Phil

Click to view attachment

I promised some time back to provide the details on the cancelled "Viking 3" mobile-lander mission, on which I was lucky enough to get a publicly unreleased detailed document about 15 yers ago. Believe me, I will do so as soon as I get a few other preliminary tasks done. It resembled, more than anything else, a much shorter-range version of MSL.

Phil:

That's great - is there a 'panorama' panorama of it, too? You know what I mean!

Bob Shaw

Bruce, I would be very interested in the Viking 3 description.

Bob, yes there is and it will appear shortly.

Phil

I should add, I took the original pans from the Photojournal, but unfortunately they don't have the full Viking 2 pans. I think I have them on an old CD somewhere, but I don't know for sure where they are now. I seem to recall MSSS had them once, but I'm not sure where at the moment. Any advice?

Phil

http://www.msss.com/mars/pictures/viking_l...ing_lander.html ?

Usefull tip for google, I searched for...

site:msss.com viking

Doug

Like the pads, you're Brillo!

Phil

I thought you were going to suggest I was damaging to non-stick pans, and fun to put on 9v batteries.

Doug

I never thought of the battery thing.

Here is the cylindrical version of the Viking 1 composite pan. It's about 50% of the original size and quite compressed to give a reasonable file size.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Phil:

Very interesting! I suppose that with Spirit more or less static for a while we may yet get some super pans with all the shadows going in the right direction for once!

Bob Shaw

Now that I look a this scene (for the millionth time) it just occured to me. Has anyone done a study or comparison on the migration/and or growth of the visible sand dunes at the Viking sites over the years they were operating? Depending on how many images were taken it might be interesting to assemble animated images of these scenes.

People looked very carefully at the Viking images for any changes. Only two were ever observed, two small slumps on steep drift faces, one too far away to be seen clearly, at V1, and nothing at V2. They are documented in a JGR paper. There's nothing to animate in the way you suggest. I'm not including the Viking 2 frost deposition here, of course.

That work has not been done for MER, and at places where the rovers sat for prolonged periods some changes might be seen. In fact we had reports on here (by Bill Harris, if I recall correctly) of a slump at Olympia. Also I think dust streaks changing at Purgatory. But there's much more that might be done.

Phil

Interesting Phil. Those observations alone should be useful in getting a handle on the ages of other dunes around Mars, i.e, definately more than six years old , and likely thousands of years old.

The static nature of that environment on a macro level is indeed awe-inspiring. I can recall immediately prior to Viking, discussions of whether or not the landers would be able to observe potential critters that might crawl past, and even a demonstration photo of what it would look like if some thing wandered into view and interrupted a scan segment. Now we know that not only is there no chance of any visible locomotion....the odds of simple mass-wasting events on our time scale are minimal as well.

What a still and lonely place it must be.

And you can still *never* find anywhere to park!

Bob Shaw

Here are some of the images used to look for movement from native life forms
on Mars by Viking:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-425/ch34.htm

This page contains the test images of using various rock types, including one
with fossils on it, and tracking the movements of a turtle in the sand:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-425/ch8.htm

I also seem to recall that surface drifts were seen to change around the Big Joe
rock that Viking 1 almost landed upon.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-425/ch19.htm

Yes, the one change that was seen clearly was a small slump on a drift right beside Big Joe. The other was several times farther away and not seen so clearly. But that was it. The Big Joe one was like a thin crust sliding off the slope (there was a feature like this at Larry's outcrop too, but we didn't see it move). The idea we get from these Viking observations is that the landscape would change little over a few years, but quite a lot over a million years.

Phil

Changes in color and albedo of features in the scene at the Viking sites were quite apparent after the twin global dust storm of 1977. Storm dust substantially muted color variations of exposed soil patches, and altered color patterns to some extent on rocks. I never was able to publish results on those studies beyond some LPSC abstracts. Data from well after the dust storms were limited as one orbiter died and overall funding for tracking was reduced. All the changes I saw were plausibly attributable to something like 1/10 to 1/100 mm of dust deposition and erosion

The lander soil mechanical properties team was reconstituted and the arm was brought out of retirement to deposit some "conical dust piles" in strategic locations, on open ground, on a rock, etc. As Viking 1 was about to die of battery failure the infrequent small direct-to-earth data showed a new dust storm had happened during the third martian winter, and significant changes had occurred to the dust pile on the rock.. partially stripped and removed, like dust on Spirit after the first big cleaning event.

Are these images available anywhere? I knew about 'Big Bertha's' slippage (Ooops, 'Big Joe!') but not about the dust piles!

Bob Shaw

Phil,

These have a special interest to me as my task as a college-age student working for 8 months with the Viking Lander Imaging Team at JPL was to construct these mosaics. Later versions of these after I had left ended up being the ones finally published. You probably have most of the online offerings covered. I do have via my home page a web page with links to the online versions that I could find.

I have a number of old prints and negatives from the versions I worked on, unfortunately no digital versions. I suppose I can always scan more of what I have though.

The URL discussed above is http://laps.noaa.gov/albers/viking.html that has various links to Viking Hi-res mosaics.

Thanks everybody. I forgot about the dust pile observations - thanks, ed. When I get around to it in future I will follow up on that. And Steve - thanks. It's going to be some time before I can get back to the Viking 2 pans, but I will eventually.

Phil

Does anybody know where the encapsulated Viking landers ( together with Aeroshell and heatshield in a closed Bioshield which consisted of a base and dome-cap ) were dry heat sterilized ?
NEC Corp should have done this prior to sending the landers to KSC for mating with the orbiters ... any weblink?

The Viking 1 dust-pile images will be on whatever NASA USGS web site has the mission data, together with abstracts from LPSC meetings in the late 70's and early 80's. Peer-Reviewed papers were probably published, but I'd have to wade into the stacks and DIG.

Viking 1 was set on an entirely automated monitoring mission, taking and blindly transmitting to Earth segments from complete panoramas that would steadily build up with time, calibration test chart pics. and a very few (as I recall) repeated targets like ?some? of the dust piles. When DSN antennas capable of receiving the signal (Mars-Earth range dependent, I expect) and not busy with other missions like Voyager or Pioneer Venus, they'd get the week's Viking data dump on some sort of "least cost / best effort" basis. I'm vaguely recalling they got maybe 60% of the transmissions.

Remember when Calvin and Hobbes went to Mars and landed near Viking 1...

http://www.calvin-und-hobbes.com/chwp34l.jpg

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/events...g30_agenda.html

SCHEDULE

Viking 30th Anniversary Conference

Mars: Past, Present and Future

Thursday, June 22, 2006

9 a.m. - 5 p.m. EDT

H.J.E. Reid Conference Center
NASA Langley Research Center
Hampton, Va.

A couple days late, but this July 4 was the thirtieth anniversary of when Viking 1
was *supposed* to land on Mars, but the mission team decided the original
landing site was too rough.

Of course it would have been a very nice capper to the United States celebrating
the Bicentennial of our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1976, but too much
had been put into the Viking landers to risk such a thing. Besides, the historic landing
might also have found itself relegated to a less important status in the public view
with everything else going on that day.

So they waited and ended up landing Viking 1 on another historic day, this one
even more appropriate - July 20, the seventh anniversary of the first manned
landing on the Moon with Apollo 11.

In SAEF-2 at KSC.

1976 - 2006 = 30 years of VIKING ...
Dr Gentry LEE still emotional about it:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/mars/viking-062206/

I have tried another attempt to clean up the Viking 1 view of the nearby relatively large crater.

Here is another one...

this is dramatic and beautiful.

This was an outstanding conference. The Viking 30th Anniversary was also celebrated at MARS DAY 2006 at NASM DC on 21 July 2006 at the Viking Lander model.
http://www.nasm.si.edu/marsday/marsdaysched.html

some comments here :
http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=2961

ken

Here is a super-res view of a nearby mound or crater. The color data for this area is bad, and I am still working on it.

Very cool!

I heard recently that Viking landers remained active on the surface for about 2000 sols! Does anyone know the exact figures for each lander? Also, they are said to have made lots of photos of seasonal changes at their sites. Would it be possible to combine them all into a movie, showing how frost sets down on the surface, sky colour changes etc.?

You do know about google don't you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program

Viking 1 Lander 20 July 1976 till 11 November 1982 for a total of 6 years, 3 months, 22 days

Viking 2 Lander 3 September 1976 till 11 April 1980 for a total of 3 years, 7 months, 8 days

The Viking lander's data returns were relatively modest, less than the rovers, at least for the imaging. During extended missions <there were several>, funding kept dropping and the landers were eventually put on an entirely automated slow monitoring program with a once-a-week-to-earth-transmission for VL-1 till it died. (VL 2 died of battery failure just before the last orbiter died, and it had lost both direct-to-earth transmitters, so it was going to be out of contact anyway).

Some scenes, like the calibration targets and other narrow strips were imaged most often, and there could be some work making animated gifs of interest covering long periods. There were also some sunrise sequences and time-of-day and the like sequences that could be worked with.

I keep wondering what might have happened if Meridiani had been selected as VL-1's landing site instead of Chryse....think that this might have had a major positive impact on public and scientific interest at that time, perhaps even enough to have initiated a manned Mars expedition by now. Coulda, shoulda, woulda...

And actually, does anyone know why Meridiani was apparently never considered? I know that surface roughness was a major site selection factor...puzzles me that Meridiani was overlooked, unless the area appears unsuitable using Earth-based radar for some reason. As it was, we were REALLY lucky not to lose both VLs in those rock gardens that were selected!

You mean the way the MERs have inspired all this public interest and support for manned missions? A fixed lander in the wrong spot in Meridiani would have been a total snoozefest; even in the right spot, not all that revolutionary in my opinion. Of course, I don't think the MERs have been that revolutionary either.

Actually, if you look at overhead rectifications, you find that the sites aren't all that hopelessly rocky; by area there is less than 2-3% rocks that would have been a Viking hazard.