Image talk:Viking Mission Profile.gif

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My name is Duke Reiber. I worked on the Viking Project, via the Viking Lander System prime contract (Martin Marietta Aerospace, Waterton [Denver], CO) continuously for more than ten years (I also worked on the mission operations flight team at JPL for three years), and have since repeatedly been involved in various post-mission documentation tasks (e.g., Mars conferences and technology reviews) as follow-up issues. An area of particular interest to me, in which I've developed good knowledge, has been what today is known at Planetary Protection (Planetary Quarantine during the Viking period). In this instance I'm simply commenting on this one piece of graphic overview. During my earliest period on the Viking Lander program, I was responsible for the development and publishing of our program's technical documentation, including graphics. I was somewhat entrepreneurial in that capacity, with limited resources on program, and often created pieces of graphic illustration on the fly. By far, the single most successful piece I produced was the predecessor to the VikingMissionProfile.gif in these pages. And, ultimately, I continued to let it evolve as various mission stages were changed and as the profile of the lander evolved via significant physical modifications. The material that appears in the middle of the Profile, illustrating how the Viking communication system worked, was never included in any of those versions of the profile. Nevertheless, you've used even that part of your version of the profile exactly as I developed it for use as an independent graphic. I created another version of the communication graphic, for example, to illustrate-as simply as possible-the nature of radio science performed very successfully at Mars (but rarely discussed because so few people understand it). I think your pages about Viking are quite good. Because your content is so familiar to me, largely because I had a lot to do with developing volumes of resource information at this level... and of course shared all of it with my colleagues at the Viking Project Office (NASA/Langley Research Center) as well as NASA Headquarters, there isn't much to be concerned about. I think what most people fail to grasp, when reviewing and thinking about the remarkable success this project achieved, is how comprehensive these landers were scientifically, because no ONE spacecraft since that time has been designed with a science spectrum as broad as the Viking lander's -- in an early electronics era when one would be inclined to assume it wasn't possible. And the science product of that science array was staggering. Gerry Soffen, Viking chief scientist who assembled one of the most challenging science teams in NASA history, later noted that the Viking mission ultimately produced nearly 80 percent of what we all knew about Mars -via text books and popular science media- over the course of the next 25 years. But it was during the primary and extended mission phases at JPL that we all discovered just how important that broad science and engineering potential really was. It let us examine all of that data from a single perspective, a laboratory perspective. The same site at the same time in the same environment with exactly the same conditions. Those instruments, by todays technical standards, were very limited in terms of the depth and breadth of science data we could acquire, but the data we got was still very good and solidly reliable even though some of the limitations hurt interpretation at critical levels of sensitivity. My point is that the greatest part of data we acquired was reliable and accurate, and we are finding substantial validation in more recent missions even as they significantly enlarge and extend the remarkable data set originally constructed by the Viking landers on their pioneering missions to the surface of Mars in 1976. On top of all of that, no spacecraft before or since had to meet the severest preparation challenge of all: It had to be sterile (or so close that there could be no question about the absence of biological contamination). To achieve that, both lander capsules were put in an oven and cooked, quite literally, prior to launch. Every part and component and instrument had to be heat qualified, and no one today truly grasps just how hard that was to do... in the early 1970s (OR how hard it would be to do it today). At some point, that will have to be done again. Thanks to James S. Martin, NASA's Viking Project manager, and outstanding organizational and program management within Martin Marietta as well as at JPL, we had a degree of project management infrastructure and cooperation during those years the likes of which I have not seen since. I'd be happy to discuss any related issues. Duke Reiber <dreiber@cox.net>