Viking '75 Mars Lander Construction, Looking for Viking lander design/construction information Options

[Tom Dahl]

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.
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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:

• Viking Mars Missions Education and Preservation Project
• The Museum of Flight in Seattle
• NASA Langley Research Center
• California Science Center
• Virginia Air and Space Center
• Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

Here is a list of on-line albums with Viking information that I have gathered. Essentially all the photographs - about 3500 currently - were taken by me (with the notable exception of those in the "Misc diagrams" album, which come from historic sources). The photos have descriptions that explain the major subject of each image. To see the descriptions with the current Google Photos web album interface, click on an image and then click the small letter i in circle (i) icon in the upper right corner. This displays an information panel that includes the description. You can also zoom and pan to see the full resolution image detail. Many images in a number of the albums show the 1000 or so measurements I have been able to capture from actual Viking hardware, thanks to the kind cooperation of the above folks.

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

[Tom Dahl]

I have been adding some major internal components to the Viking '75 Mars lander 3D digital model, including the large Equipment Plate that spans most of the upper interior of the lander. The Equipment Plate is a one-piece aluminum machined unit which is supported by nine titanium fittings attached to the sides of the lander body. Most of the lander's interior equipment (batteries, power control, tape recorder, science instruments, computer, communications assemblies) are bolted to the bottom surface of the Equipment Plate and hang down below it within the volume of the lander body. Here is an overall view of the lander body and equipment plate, without the lander's top dust cover.

Here is an above view of the equipment plate and attached components, including those nine titanium support fittings arranged around the plate's perimeter. The little red cylinders are standoffs to support the lander body top dust cover.

Here is a below view of the equipment plate, which is relatively plain. It does show the portion of the serpentine coolant loop which was attached to the underside of the plate. The coolant loop was used prior to launch to circulate chilled water around the lander's two Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs), which produced more excess heat under Earth seal-level conditions than the lander was designed to sustain. As seen here, the loop also traveled around the equipment plate to reduce internal lander temperatures.

Here is a detail view of one of the two camera mount adapters bolted to the top of the equipment plate, to which a camera was attached on top of the lander (this is the mount for camera #1). The little red fasteners are Hi-Lok collars, a specialized type of nut that was used extensively in assembling the lander. The collars work with Hi-Lok pins, a type of bolt. Along with a special installation tool, the Hi-Lok pins and collars can be installed in situations with limited access to the bolt-side of the fastener. The tip of the pin has a hex recess; the installation tool uses this to prevent the pin from rotating when the collar is tightened.

This detail view shows a small tripod and bipod attached to the equipment plate's upper surface. These supported the inboard side of RTG #2; the outboard side was supported by the upper edge of the adjacent lander body side beam (not shown in this image, but visible in the first image above). A similar tripod-bipod pair for supporting RTG #1 is located across the equipment plate.