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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Mar 28 2017, 03:44 PM
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14434 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
As someone who has dabbled in various 3D platforms for some time - including SketchUp - I genuinely doff my cap to you - this is incredible work, Tom.
Have you considered using Structure from Motion (i.e. ingesting a LOT of photos into something like AgiSoft Photoscan) - as way of getting reference photos into a 3d digital domain? Happy to help with that if it could be useful. |
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Mar 29 2017, 11:24 PM
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#3
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Member Group: Members Posts: 101 Joined: 3-May 12 From: Massachusetts, USA Member No.: 6392 |
Thank you for the compliment, Doug! It's a labor of love, equal emphasis on labor and love. I've probably invested about 1500 hours in front of SketchUp and Photoshop working on the lander model. The whole thing is available to anyone free of charge on my DropBox site; I'm sure I posted a link earlier in this thread.
Regarding automated processing of 2D photographs into a 3D image, I have in fact experimented briefly with AgiSoft's Photoscan. Last summer Mattias Malmer and I corresponded about our respective spacecraft-modeling projects and he suggested it. I was totally disappointed with the result, though I acknowledge I gave it a challenging object to detect and model. I have 30 or so photos of a particular bracket on the lander (High Gain Antenna down-lock), which I fed to the software. The images were ~4300x2800 pixels and taken from viewing angles of about 180 degrees horizontally and perhaps 90 degrees vertically (range limited by obstructions). It never yielded anything more than a blob. I tried a few different crop levels, and even masking out the (complex) background. Nada. I suppose I should have tried on a simpler case, but I was suspicious of the level of dimensional accuracy that might result in the best of cases. In total I have over 3500 photos I've taken of actual viking test hardware (all posted for free access in Google Photo albums), so I've got a reasonable collection of source images for experimentation. Maybe again at some point! |
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