Viking Landers, Book and website recommendations Options

[Phil Stooke]

Bruce, I would be very interested in the Viking 3 description.

Bob, yes there is and it will appear shortly.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

I should add, I took the original pans from the Photojournal, but unfortunately they don't have the full Viking 2 pans. I think I have them on an old CD somewhere, but I don't know for sure where they are now. I seem to recall MSSS had them once, but I'm not sure where at the moment. Any advice?

Phil

[djellison]

http://www.msss.com/mars/pictures/viking_l...ing_lander.html ?

Usefull tip for google, I searched for...

site:msss.com viking

Doug

[Phil Stooke]

Like the pads, you're Brillo!

Phil

[djellison]

I thought you were going to suggest I was damaging to non-stick pans, and fun to put on 9v batteries.

Doug

[Phil Stooke]

I never thought of the battery thing.

Here is the cylindrical version of the Viking 1 composite pan. It's about 50% of the original size and quite compressed to give a reasonable file size.

Phil

[Bob Shaw]

Phil:

Very interesting! I suppose that with Spirit more or less static for a while we may yet get some super pans with all the shadows going in the right direction for once!

Bob Shaw

[ElkGroveDan]

Now that I look a this scene (for the millionth time) it just occured to me. Has anyone done a study or comparison on the migration/and or growth of the visible sand dunes at the Viking sites over the years they were operating? Depending on how many images were taken it might be interesting to assemble animated images of these scenes.

[Phil Stooke]

People looked very carefully at the Viking images for any changes. Only two were ever observed, two small slumps on steep drift faces, one too far away to be seen clearly, at V1, and nothing at V2. They are documented in a JGR paper. There's nothing to animate in the way you suggest. I'm not including the Viking 2 frost deposition here, of course.

That work has not been done for MER, and at places where the rovers sat for prolonged periods some changes might be seen. In fact we had reports on here (by Bill Harris, if I recall correctly) of a slump at Olympia. Also I think dust streaks changing at Purgatory. But there's much more that might be done.

Phil

[ElkGroveDan]

Interesting Phil. Those observations alone should be useful in getting a handle on the ages of other dunes around Mars, i.e, definately more than six years old , and likely thousands of years old.

The static nature of that environment on a macro level is indeed awe-inspiring. I can recall immediately prior to Viking, discussions of whether or not the landers would be able to observe potential critters that might crawl past, and even a demonstration photo of what it would look like if some thing wandered into view and interrupted a scan segment. Now we know that not only is there no chance of any visible locomotion....the odds of simple mass-wasting events on our time scale are minimal as well.

What a still and lonely place it must be.

[Bob Shaw]

What a still and lonely place it must be.

And you can still *never* find anywhere to park!

Bob Shaw

[ljk4-1]

People looked very carefully at the Viking images for any changes. Only two were ever observed, two small slumps on steep drift faces, one too far away to be seen clearly, at V1, and nothing at V2. They are documented in a JGR paper. There's nothing to animate in the way you suggest. I'm not including the Viking 2 frost deposition here, of course.

That work has not been done for MER, and at places where the rovers sat for prolonged periods some changes might be seen. In fact we had reports on here (by Bill Harris, if I recall correctly) of a slump at Olympia. Also I think dust streaks changing at Purgatory. But there's much more that might be done.

Phil

Here are some of the images used to look for movement from native life forms
on Mars by Viking:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-425/ch34.htm

This page contains the test images of using various rock types, including one
with fossils on it, and tracking the movements of a turtle in the sand:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-425/ch8.htm

I also seem to recall that surface drifts were seen to change around the Big Joe
rock that Viking 1 almost landed upon.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-425/ch19.htm

[Phil Stooke]

Yes, the one change that was seen clearly was a small slump on a drift right beside Big Joe. The other was several times farther away and not seen so clearly. But that was it. The Big Joe one was like a thin crust sliding off the slope (there was a feature like this at Larry's outcrop too, but we didn't see it move). The idea we get from these Viking observations is that the landscape would change little over a few years, but quite a lot over a million years.

Phil

[edstrick]

Changes in color and albedo of features in the scene at the Viking sites were quite apparent after the twin global dust storm of 1977. Storm dust substantially muted color variations of exposed soil patches, and altered color patterns to some extent on rocks. I never was able to publish results on those studies beyond some LPSC abstracts. Data from well after the dust storms were limited as one orbiter died and overall funding for tracking was reduced. All the changes I saw were plausibly attributable to something like 1/10 to 1/100 mm of dust deposition and erosion

The lander soil mechanical properties team was reconstituted and the arm was brought out of retirement to deposit some "conical dust piles" in strategic locations, on open ground, on a rock, etc. As Viking 1 was about to die of battery failure the infrequent small direct-to-earth data showed a new dust storm had happened during the third martian winter, and significant changes had occurred to the dust pile on the rock.. partially stripped and removed, like dust on Spirit after the first big cleaning event.

[Bob Shaw]

The lander soil mechanical properties team was reconstituted and the arm was brought out of retirement to deposit some "conical dust piles" in strategic locations, on open ground, on a rock, etc. As Viking 1 was about to die of battery failure the infrequent small direct-to-earth data showed a new dust storm had happened during the third martian winter, and significant changes had occurred to the dust pile on the rock.. partially stripped and removed, like dust on Spirit after the first big cleaning event.

Are these images available anywhere? I knew about 'Big Bertha's' slippage (Ooops, 'Big Joe!') but not about the dust piles!

Bob Shaw