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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Dec 21 2014, 09:17 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 101 Joined: 3-May 12 From: Massachusetts, USA Member No.: 6392 |
Here is some additional information on Viking lander hardware which I collected in Hampton Virginia USA in November, at NASA's Langley Research Center (home to the Viking Program Office) and at the Virginia Air and Space Center. Thanks to the generous time and assistance of Mary Gainer, LaRC Historic Preservation Officer, I had the rare privilege to examine a Viking surface sampler's Collector Head and Shroud Unit in the LaRC archives. Thanks to the extremely kind cooperation of Allen Hoilman, Curator and Director of Exhibits at the VASC, I was able to spend an entire day (when the VASC was closed to the public) measuring and photographing the Viking lander on display. I believe this unit was the Science Test Lander while at JPL in the 1970s.
Examining the surface sampler Collector Head Shroud Unit (CHSU) at LaRC was an extreme treat. I have never found high-quality photographs of such a unit, to say nothing of seeing and handling one in person! The LaRC's CHSU is accompanied by a collector head as well (serial number 20). It is a pristine unit, fabulously clean compared to the units mounted on the landers at the VASC and Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (both of which which saw much testing during the '70s and thus are quite grubby), or the collector head on the lander displayed at the California Science Center (which has a thick coat of cracked and peeling yellow paint). I was able to capture nearly 100 measurements and photographs of the CHSU and collector head. Here is a reduced-resolution sample: My 11-hour day at the VASC measuring their lander was exhausting but very rewarding. I captured nearly 600 individual measurements, and added about 350 detail high-resolution photographs to my album of that lander. Most excitingly this includes a number of images capturing the interior (mostly empty) of this lander, which has an open bottom. (I suspect the mounting area for the Terminal Descent Landing Radar (TDLR) was cut from the lander's bottom cover to facilitate disposal of simulant Mars soil samples which were deposited during testing and mission planning into the Processing and Distribution Assembly (PDA) inlets of the Biology and Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer instruments.) Here is an annotated interior image, and a sample of measurements of the Biology PDA: Thanks again to Mary Gainer at the LaRC and Allen Hoilman at the VASC for their assistance in allowing me to conduct these examinations. |
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Jun 17 2015, 12:30 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 153 Joined: 4-May 11 From: Pardubice, CZ Member No.: 5979 |
(I suspect the mounting area for the Terminal Descent Landing Radar (TDLR) was cut from the lander's bottom cover to facilitate disposal of simulant Mars soil samples which were deposited during testing and mission planning into the Processing and Distribution Assembly (PDA) inlets of the Biology and Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer instruments.) Here is an annotated interior image, and a sample of measurements of the Biology PDA Hi Tom, regarding PDA or better SSPDA (soil sample processing and distribution assembly) you might be willing to contact Steve Jurvetson as he in now the owner of flight qualified Biological instrument unit SN 104 including SSPDA as a newest item of his space artefacts collection. Maybe he could support your effort and let you measure this unit in detail for your 3D modelling purposes. https://m.flickr.com/#/photos/jurvetson/185...57623704246792/ |
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