Viking '75 Mars Lander Construction, Looking for Viking lander design/construction information |
Viking '75 Mars Lander Construction, Looking for Viking lander design/construction information |
May 17 2012, 12:38 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 101 Joined: 3-May 12 From: Massachusetts, USA Member No.: 6392 |
Greetings all! I am searching for detailed construction and design information about the NASA Viking '75 Mars project hardware, particularly for the lander, aeroshell, base cover, and bioshield. Can anyone recommend good sources? I am especially looking for engineering drawings and under-construction photographs.
To set the stage, here is an album of about 100 drawings and photos which I've collected so far. I have already read the "usual" books, such as NASA RP-1027 "Viking '75 Spacecraft Design and Test", the press kits, the scientific papers produced about the mission, a number of industry papers covering various instruments and subsystems, the major Martin Marietta books, etc. I am hoping to find additional sources. Any ideas? Also, does anyone know if there are aeroshell, base cover, or bioshield components lurking in a museum or in storage somewhere? FYI, I have visited three of the best landers still on Earth: The Proof Test Capsule in the Smithsonian NASM, the Flight Capsule 3 (backup) in the Museum of Flight near Seattle, and the Science Test Lander in the Virginia Air and Space Center. I've taken nearly 1,000 photos of the three of them (most of which are publicly available in other Picasa Web albums of mine). I've taken a few measurements, but I would dearly love to find more authoritative drawings of more hardware (interior, exterior, everything). I have begun submitting some Freedom of Information Act requests to NASA/JPL which has started to bear some trivial but kind of fun fruit. --- Update as of March 2017: During the past few years I have been fortunate enough to collect a significant amount of information on the Viking lander hardware. My thanks to a number of organizations for providing me access to their resources:
Flight Capsule 3 in Seattle Museum of Flight (756 photos) Dimensioned diagrams of the FC3 lander PTC Lander at Smithsonian NASM 2013 (466 photos) PTC Lander at Smithsonian NASM 2016 (888 photos) Lander at Virginia Air and Space Center (622 photos) Dimensioned diagrams of the VASC’s lander Lander at California Science Center (456 photos) Dimensioned diagrams of the CSC's lander Misc diagrams, unusual photos (over 350 images) Body assembly blueprints Collector Head Shroud Unit at NASA LaRC (99 photos) Biology instrument at Cleveland MoNH (36 photos) Meteorology Sensor Assembly (60 photos) Meteorology Electronics Assembly (22 photos) Tape Recorder (53 photos) High Gain Antenna photos and measurements (96 images) XRFS Instrument (42 images) Viking lander contractor historic scale model (14 images) My Viking project documents collection The main focus of my efforts during the past few years has been to create an accurate and high-fidelity digital 3D model of the Viking lander. I've chosen to use the SketchUp software to build the model because a near-full-featured free version is available, allowing other people to use my model. The 3D model itself, as a work-in-progress, is available via DropBox. I update that model file periodically as major elements get added. I've created an album containing numerous renderings of digital model components, and I have a YouTube channel with some videos about the modeling project. I have also uploaded the lander core body and the Surface Sampler Collector Head to the SketchUp 3D Warehouse so that other people can easily access those components (the 3D Warehouse can be accessed from within SketchUp, or via web browser). The file on DropBox lister earlier contains those components and others. -- Tom |
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Jun 17 2015, 12:47 AM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 101 Joined: 3-May 12 From: Massachusetts, USA Member No.: 6392 |
My on-going quest to research the Viking '75 missions recently took me to the Pacific Northwest where I had opportunities to measure and photograph some unusual Viking lander hardware. My thanks to Rachel Tillman and Jim Tillman and the Viking Mars Missions Education and Preservation Project for granting me access to a Meteorology Electronics Assembly (MEA), Tape Recorder (TR), and S-Band High Gain Antenna (HGA), as well as some rare original technical documentation, and also special access to the backup Flight Capsule 3 lander body in the Museum of Flight in Seattle. My grateful thanks also to the Museum of Flight staff including Senior Curator Dan Hagedorn and Registrar and Accessions Team Leader Christine Runte for facilitating my after-hours access to the FC3. All of your help was critical in making my 3000 mile trip a very enjoyable success.
Firstly are about 50 photographs and some measurements of lander Tape Recorder serial number 001. The lander tape recorders were unusual in having all-metal recording tape in order to survive the ~240F sterilization temperature to which the complete lander capsules were subjected. This unit lacks its top cover which thus exposes the tape transport and record/playback head mechanisms to view. A marvelous device. For reference here is a photograph of one of the lander tape recorders right after its installation within a Flight lander. Here's a reduced-size image of the TR under study: Next up was a session photographing a lander Meteorology Sensor Assembly (MSA). For protection of the MSA's delicate thermocouples this unit is kept within a metal and glass frame which somewhat obscures the view, but keeps the unit pristine. Normally the MSA would be installed at the end of the lander's external deployable Meteorology Boom Assembly (MBA). I then spent a few hours at the Museum of Flight doing further study of the backup lander body exhibited there. I added some 70 photographs to my album of FC3 detail photographs, now containing over 700 images. I was especially pleased to capture about 170 total measurements of the Meteorology Boom Assembly and of a landing leg's internal mechanisms. A few days later I was in Portland OR to study some additional materials. Here are some photographs I was able to capture of technical drawings of the Viking Meteorology Instrument System (VMIS) components. The images suffer from various distortions due to non-flat document pages, a hand-held camera, etc. but they nevertheless record fascinating information such as MBA measurements and internal details of the MBA hinge mechanism. I captured photographs of a unit I had never seen in person previously, a Meteorology Electronics Assembly (MEA) which would be located within the lander body near leg 2. Rachel Tillman and the Viking Preservation Project own serial number 001. Seeing an MEA in person was very nice. For those unfamiliar, here is the MEA: Lastly I spent a couple of hours capturing about 170 measurements and nearly 90 detail photographs of an S-Band High Gain Antenna (HGA), serial number 21. Because this unit is not mounted on a lander, close-up views from all sides (including the top, normally hard to see) were possible. Here is a taste of the resulting measurements (depicting the dish mount and elevation pivot mechanisms): My thanks again to Rachel Tillman, Jim Tillman, Dan Hagedorn, and Christine Runte for allowing me such a treat to examine authentic Viking artifacts. |
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