The Vikings of '76:
I have my spare copie of this book up for auction: http://www.astro-auction.com/cgi-bin/aucti...item=1181390227

It turns out that the 'Viking 3' mission Bruce briefly mentioned was not the only plan to give mobility to a Viking mission considered by NASA Langley. On the NTRS are three reports from 1974 which look into modifying the flight-spare so that it could carry a rover to the Martian surface in 1979 or 1981.

The planned rover would have been a four-wheeled RTG powered unit built (in part) from Viking spare parts. To accommodate it the lander would have sacrificed one camera, one RTG (the other would be replaced with a Voyager RTG) and moved the meteorology instruments, other modifications included the fitting of an additional UHF antenna to communicate with the rover to both the lander and the orbiter. Finally , the original biology package and XRFS would be replaced with redesigned instruments.

The reports are as follows:

1. Viking 79 Rover, Conceptual Report, A 4.5mb file which contains the original discussion for the rover/lander plan.

2. Viking 79 Rover Study Vol.1, Summary Report. A 4.5mb file which covers the Martin-Marietta study into the preferred rover design.

3. Viking 79 Rover Study Vol.2, Detailed Technical Report. This 14mb file contains the detailed technical specifications of the rover.

Click to view attachment

Artists impression of the Lander and Rover on the Martian Surface

Well, this isn't a book or website recommendation, but it is Viking and i didn't want to start a new thread.

I have been looking for several months for the minutes of the Viking Landing Site Working Group meetings. I want to give a full description of the process of Viking landing site selection in my Mars book. That's the same i did for Ranger, Surveyor and Apollo in the Moon atlas.

The minutes were very hard to track down. Matt Golombek didn't have them, none of the RPIFs seem to have them, Flagstaff isn't sure what it's got right now. Finally Matt suggested I contact Mike Carr, who did some of that work. Mike had discarded his minutes when he retired. But he put me in touch with Norm Crabill, who also worked on the problem. And Norm has them. I hope to have a copy soon.

There was a NASA SP, "On Mars", with a summary of this. But it's full of gaps. I hope now that the full story can be told for the first time.

Phil

I recall being at a site selection meeting at JPL for VL-2 in early August 1976. Though few details come back to me my impression is there were two sites being considered. The science team members voted by raising their hands for one site. I think Jim Martin ended up deciding on the safer site however. There is a photograph of that meeting I believe in a NASA book.

Indeed Steve, that hand raising photo is in these books:

NASA SP-425 The Martian Landscape (page 29: Site certification meeting Viking 2 Lander)

The Vikings of '76 (pages 10-24: excellent series of photos for both Lander meetings)

Both photo series were taken by, then 16-year old, Hans-Peter Biemann and his photobook gives a superb account of the round the clock activities of the Viking Mission teams at JPL between 19th June and 17th September 1976!

Hoping the UMSF Admins won't kill me for adding another large image

Viking III always intrigued me - but I really wonder at how well the 70's tech would have handled obstacle avoidance. Or would roving just be on the order of centimeters a day?

My google skills fail me when I try to search for any documentation for this proposed mission.

EDIOT: Apparently my previous page in thread skills fail me as well. Thanks, gndonald.

Phil Stooke (and anyone else writing a historical space book):

You probably already know this, but the San Francisco facility of the National Archives and Records Administration holds millions of pages of NASA center documents, including meeting notes and anything else you could think of. Unfortunately, very little is online. I don't know much about this personally, so here's the initial website to track down NASA stuff (many other government entities store documents here also):

www.archives.gov/pacific/san-francisco

NASA is records group RG 255

Going back to the original question on this thread, where can one find sol-by-sol summaries of the activities of the two Viking landers? The Viking project generated daily reports, after launch until end of mission (as all NASA spacecraft do). These were mainly engineering reports to keep track of the health of the spacecraft, but they would have had to include all instrument activities as well. These should have been kept as paper copies and stored in the National Archives, as I mentioned previously. They probably have not been converted to electronic form, since they are among millions of pages from all NASA projects in its first few decades. I could be wrong, if they were somehow given priority over other projects, but I have my doubts. Only a very small percentage of NASA archives have been converted to electronic files.

Those who are highly motivated (like book authors) or are lucky enough to live next to the San Francisco facility can probably arrange to see those records. I think you have to fill out a Freedom of Information Act request. After that, I'm not sure if there are fees involved, if you have to physically search through boxes of papers, or whatnot. But I'm sure there are fascinating things hidden in those archives.

I should add that some things in the NASA archives are still classified. There could even be some things in the Viking project, such as certain aspects of the plutonium in the RTGs. That's just a guess, but the point is that there could be restrictions on viewing some things. You wouldn't be allowed to romp freely through all the NASA boxes.

Here's a link to one of the books PhilCo126 mentioned in post #105. Others have mentioned chapters earlier in the thread:

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

The site selection meeting (post #104) is Figure 22 in this chapter:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-425/ch14.htm

P.S. I was in the peanut gallery sitting on the floor off to the right of the picture.

Thanks for the pointer. A check on the National Archives' online search engine turned up very little material on the Viking project from either NASA or the Geological Survey: 10 films at the archive's College Park, MD film depository and 3 items from Houston at their Fort Worth archive center. No materials from the San Francisco archive center turned up in the search -- but they may be there since the on-line catalog is a work in progress.

As a historian who has worked in the archives occasionally, I can say that you don't need a freedom of information request for most uses. However you do need a lot of patience, as learning your way around a collection can take some time. I've found the archive staff to be helpful.

Steve M

I will also point out that some Viking materials were copied to or delivered directly to other institutions, some of which may have archived them. For example, Cornell received a lot of Viking materials, since Sagan and others in Ithaca were on the Viking imaging teams.

I know there are (or were) Viking images at Cornell, but have no idea what other materials may have been sent there as "support" data. It might be worth making some inquiries there and at the universities where other Viking PIs were employed.

-the other Doug

Thanks

As far as I've been able to uncover, there seem to have been two ideas for Viking 79, the first is the mission where the lander is mounted on tractor treads. I've been unable to uncover anything about this proposal on the NTRS server.

The second is the one that I stumbled across, where the lander is used to carry a rover to the surface of Mars in the manner of the later Pathfinder mission.

I've double checked the documentation I downloaded, they were hoping to drive about 0.7km a day (unlikely in real life). The plan was to use orbiter photos, Lander imagery, while the rover was close to the lander, and pictures taken by the rovers camera to plot the Rovers path on the surface.

Once the Rover was out of sight of the lander, the Rover camera would take a panorama and then 'snapshots' to plot the days path.

As with most planning documents they had fairly high aims, for example had Viking III (or IV) been landed in Gustav crater, they would have made every effort to reach the Columbia Hills, although the designed rover would probably have been unable to climb them (ground clearance was 22cm). One of the long term objectives was to get a soil sample from some distance (up to 40km) from the lander and bring it back for analysis.

One other interesting idea that they considered was to have the Rover deploy instrument packages well away (up to 100m) from the lander as shown below before driving off on the long term mission.

I've found another Martin-Marietta study dealing with a 'Viking III' mission. This one was part of a study into giving the lander a limited 'decision making' capacity including the ability to pick the exact landing site during the descent.

This lander would also have had a rover, but it was more along the lines of a tethered instrument deployment unit/sample collector.

Perhaps of more interest is that this lander would have carried a drill capable of reaching a depth of one meter below ground level, this is the one thing that the rovers have been unable to do, create a true stratigraphic profile of the Martian crust.

See: Study of Adaptive Systems Vol III. Mars Landed Systems (12.5mb)