11/24/2023 0 Comments Viking mars landing![]() It was only in later versions, which had been properly calibrated and color balanced, that the true rust red color of the surface was revealed along with a dust-laden red sky instead of the expected blue color. After being transmitted back to Earth, initial publicly released versions of the image showed a blue sky and a salmon colored surface. It would be the Viking 1 lander’s second Sol on the Martian surface before it took its first color image. In the days that followed, Viking transmitted more images and data about the conditions on the surface of the Red Planet. Click on image to view a full-resolution version. The second image returned by Viking 1 using Camera 2 provided a panoramic view of the landing site on Chryse Planitia. Earlier Soviet Luna, Mars and Venera landers used devices the Soviets called “telephotometers” which operated on a similar principle (see “ Luna 9: The First Lunar Landing” and “ Venera 9 & 10 to Venus“). Each camera could scan up to 342.5° in azimuth and from 40° above to 60° below the horizon. The nodding motion of the mirror allowed one column of the scene to be scanned before the camera turret rotated stepwise in azimuth to allow the adjacent columns to be scanned one at a time. ![]() Unlike the vidicon-based cameras used on NASA’s robotic Surveyor lunar landers a decade earlier which returned individual frames of the scene (see “ Surveyor 1: America’s First Moon Lander”), the Viking Lander cameras used a scanning mirror to reflect the scene onto a set of a dozen light-sensitive photodiodes. The Viking landers each sported a pair of 7.3-kilogram cameras on their upper deck mounted 0.822 meters apart to provide stereo views of the landscape. L’Herault, I even performed some of the student experiments outlined in the Viking educational literature I had obtained during that school year preceding the landing.Ī diagram with the outline of the Viking lander features illustrating the location of the first pair of preprogrammed images to be taken by Camera 2 when Viking 1 landed on Mars. With the encouragement of my 8 th grade Earth science teacher, Mr. Over the next couple of years, my interest in Viking was further fueled by literature I had received by mail from NASA outlining the Viking project and its experiments. While I had been increasingly aware of NASA’s Mars landing plans as the early 1970s unfolded, my interest in Viking and its search for life on Mars was supercharged in 1974 when I watched a summer rerun of an episode of the then-new PBS science show, Nova, entitled “The Search for Life” (see “ Growing Up in the Space Age: Summer Vacations in the ‘70s”). Without a doubt, the most memorable live event I had witnessed as a teenage space enthusiast was the landing of Viking 1 on the surface of Mars on the morning of Jwhen I was 14 years old – seven years to the day after the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
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