Viking 1 at 50: NASA's first raid on the red planet It's been 50 years since NASA sent Viking 1 on a mission to Mars. Launched on a Titan-Centaur rocket from Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on August 20, 1975, Viking 1 was one of a pair of probes sent to land on Mars. Viking 1 consisted of an orbiter and a lander and followed earlier US missions to Mars that had …
The Viking 1 lander landed on Mars on July 20 1976, not June 20 as implied in the article. The process of selecting a new landing site took longer than a day. By the way, The Viking lander is a subject I am very interested in for many years. I have created a few videos that describe various aspects of the landers. For example, here is my video (hosted on YouTube) about the lander's pair of SNAP-19 Viking radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) which were briefly mentioned in the article: https://youtu.be/2ZnnzusE1mo
July 4, 1976 was the US' 200th "anniversary"
It was an enormous event. Everyone had Bicentennial themed products, there was a new quarter minted, and basically the entire year was one big party.
So NASA had "Third Century America" at KSC in front of the VAB with 15 geodesic domes full of exhibits and a Saturn V. Don't bother googling for it, there's nothing online about it, but that same Saturn V is now in the Saturn V display center. This is when the VAB got painted with the Bicentennial star symbol.
Anyway one of the dome exhibits had the engineering & test version of the Viking lander on a replica Mars surface carefully groomed to be identical to the pictures of the real surface. After the landing, it even had the arm hooked up to replicate in real time the motions of the arm on the real probe. You could watch it scoop soil up and put it in the science labs.
Another dome had a new IR sensor that read your pulse and blood oxygen percentage, built into a desk and powered by a PDP-11. You put your finger in the clip mounted on the desk. This was derived from Skylab equipment and is now a tiny self contained device you can clip on your finger.
You could also walk into the VAB, and there was a tiny Lunar Module way off in the distance, in the middle of the floor. You walked, and walked, and walked, and finally found out it was a full size LM you could climb into. There was a Rover you could sit on, and Apollo spacesuits. You could put an Apollo space suit arm on, attach an EVA glove, and find out just how damned hard it was to simply pick up a rock or a hammer.
There was a ton of other stuff that completely overwhelmed an 11yo kid, so I don't remember it all.
I'm absolutely shocked to see there's no plans to do anything similar for the 250th next year. That's just really sad.
For the 200th, there was like 3 years of planning and excitement leading up to 1976. Everything that could be painted red, white, and blue, was done.
I really can't describe the atmosphere of optimism, pride, unity and patriotism to anyone now. It was basically the anti-covid, if that makes sense.
You do know there was already a monarchy BEFORE the Normans arrived, don't you? So, a 1000 year anniversary still some way off, but not the anniversary you think it is.
Æthelstan is generally regarded as the first King of England, so the 1000th anniversary you are alluding to was back in 1924.
I'm assuming you are a republican with a misplaced sense of history.
Funnily enough, the contemporary accounts speak of a divided nation, still scarred by Watergate and Vietnam and of a celebration that for some was not enough and for others a total glossing over of "how evil America was" for the others. This was one year after the fall of Saigon.
Having lived here during that timeframe, mostly it was all rah-rah-rah from the usual simpletons, a few dreary meat-heads babbling about the (cherry-picked) negative past, and then the vast majority of us who were more "meh", regardless of how much the media of the era tried to rile us up.
"A tape drive?"
Yep. Voyager 1's 8-track DTR (Digital Tape Recorder) is still used, we get a dump from it twice per year (or thereabouts). Here's a picture of it:
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-recorder/
They stopped using Voyager 2's DTR back in 2007, not because it is broken, but because the last instrument than can feed it stopped working.
The Voyagers were launched a few days apart in August and September of 1977.
"Considering how hard it is to get them working reliably even down here"
I've never had problems getting tape drives working. In fact, I have working tape drives that are older than the ones in Voyager. IMO any modern backup solution that doesn't include tape storage is a sham at best, probably brought about by ignorant management ... although I've also seen it as a willful and intentional means of corporate sabotage..
"IMO any modern backup solution that doesn't include tape storage is a sham at best"
It's a very inexpensive way to backup a ton of data. It's not as handy as a hard drive, but works great for long term, last line of defense backups. If you have data that should be stored indefinitely, tape should be part of the archive.
