PASADENA, Calif. - In the late spring of 1976, specialists and researchers on NASA's Viking mission wanted to do something no one had ever done before: land on Mars with a fully functional space shuttle.
They placed three science probes aboard the Viking 1 lander, each of which examined the Martian soil for microorganisms. The lander also pointed out two cameras that were, by their own doing, a life detection tool. A lone image could solve the age-old mystery of extraterrestrial life. No one could completely rule out the possibility that some Martian animal might slip by.
June 20 Live Q&A: It's been a long time since Viking 1 arrived on Mars. We realized that.
"The chance of individuals becoming popular in the short term if we found life was almost palpable," says Ben Clark, who worked for Martin Marietta, the organization that built Viking under contract to NASA. “There could have been Nobel Prizes.
Forty years on, the Viking mission remains incredible—both for its triumphs and its disillusionments—and continues to cast a shadow over the investigation of Mars.
As the meanders move across Mars today, they provide no tools for recognizing life. This is not the result of assuming that Mars is sterile, but because Viking has shown that logical questions must be framed carefully. Viking's fallacy can be described as a logical ineptitude.
A while ago, researchers and designers were trying to do a lot quickly. However, it was a particularly exciting time when so many boundaries were crossed, countless principles were broken, so much knowledge was broken. On the off chance that you weren't stretching, you weren't really trying.
Landing on Mars
The year 1976 was not only a celebration of the country's 200th birthday, it was also a year of political decisions. Gerald R. Portage, an undrafted president, plugged the White House and faced a solid test on his right wing from Ronald Reagan. Liberals were poised to nominate a walnut farmer and one-term leader of Georgia named Jimmy Carter. Watergate and Vietnam were new, agonizing memories.
Space travel was a breeze. The last Apollo landing was four years earlier, and space transportation was still a long way from its first flight. Still, Viking could breathe new life into the space program.
The Viking mission sent two shuttles, one after the other. Viking 1 went into space around Mars on June 19; Viking 2 was expected to appear earlier than expected in August. Each delivered a mechanical lander.
The brutal truth about water on Mars and NASA's Mars excursion
Nobility Lee was one of the youthful, reckless, long-haired architects dedicated to the task. He later became famous as a science fiction essayist. First he needed help landing two rockets on Mars.
"I burned seven years of my life averaging 60 hours and seven days chipping away at the Viking," Lee said recently at NASA's Fly Drive Research facility in Pasadena. “I had no life.
He recalls how the cosmologist Carl Sagan, another fellow Viking, was "delayed" in arranging meetings. Sagan, a Cornell cosmologist, previously gained notoriety for his appearances on Johnny Carson's "This evening Show." It was Sagan who reasoned that the Viking should be equipped with an external light, as Martian animals might be attracted to it.
Lee, exasperated by Sagan's argument, made a deal with him: Come to my office any time and talk to me however you need to, but let others speak at the meetings. Sagan agreed.
At the time, relatively little was known about the outer layer of Mars. A distant memory was the fanciful Mars of Percival Lowell, the persuasive stargazer who, in the late nineteenth and mid-twenties, claimed to see through his telescope trenches at surface level—probably made by a Martian. development.
Sagan was among the people who resolved that the occasional minor deviations from the Martian surface—which several researchers thought were signs of vegetation—were caused by dust storms.
The primary clear perspective on the surface level came in 1965, when NASA's Sailor 4 probe flew by and captured images of the pits—a surface similar to Earth's Moon. A later Sailor mission revealed huge volcanoes and a gorge that could eat Earth's amazing gorge.
The Viking group picked out the arrival site, but Viking 1 transmitted images showing the site to be rough, possibly covered in rocks. The 4th of July date was rejected. The group burned for 17 days, working around the clock trying to figure out where to land.
They ended up choosing an area called Chryse Planitia, not because it looked ideal, but because Viking 2 was moving quickly toward Mars and they realized they couldn't effectively monitor both shuttles.
"We were exhausted," Lee said. His significant other was expected to give birth to his most memorable child at the end of July, and Lee echoed his saying: "Could you ever get something to land so I can bring that baby into the world?"
Achieving arrival at Mars would have to be done through prearranged, computer-controlled movements, since Mars was many miles from the control point here in Pasadena. The spacecraft cannot be operated with a joystick at such a distance.
Do we really need to say whether we are in good company in space?
The arrival of the world is uncertain with an environment too flimsy to even consider helping to slow down a vehicle with parachutes but thick enough to cause malfunctions or overheating. The Soviets made several attempts to land a mechanical vehicle on Mars; only one landed flawlessly. It communicated futile information for a few moments before falling silent until the end of time.
On July 20, 1976—the seventh anniversary of the primary lunar walk—the Viking lander separated from the mother transport and began its steep descent toward the surface. The engines went out for a moment. The parachutes sent were then disposed of at that moment. Once again, the engines quit. The excursion to the surface lasted over three hours, and the JPL flight crew could only stand back and trust.
A sign appeared at mission control, proving the Viking had landed safely, picking out three legs with lily pad-shaped bases.
In The Washington Post, correspondent Tom O'Toole reported, "Tears flowed down the essence of the Chief of Mission Arrangement B. Upper class Lee, tugging at his shoulder-length hair since the Viking left Earth 11 months ago."
Searching forever
Then, at that moment, the primary image came from the surface. It showed. . . rocks. Further, on the right half of the edge, one of the Viking stepping stones. It was a wonderfully exhausting image, but it was actually Mars. Mars! Everyone knew by now: This is what Mars looks like.
Lee recently said, "I actually get goosebumps just thinking about it all. Out of nowhere, humanity has managed to do something that most people would have thought was ridiculous just 20 years ago."
Lee understood why there was a foot pad in the main picture: to realize how deep the Viking could sink to the surface. "33% of researchers concluded that the consistency of Mars might be like shaving cream," he said.
The next huge event was a search forever. Be that as it may, something went wrong. The mechanical arm should engage and collect some debris. Still, the arm didn't move. The Viking could do nothing! Lee voiced interjections that cannot be distributed in a family-friendly article.
Finally, the group realized that they had forgotten to load the product code to open the arm. They beamed a direction to the PC spaceship on Mars.
Over many days, Viking played science tests. The shuttle was preheated to high temperatures before the flyby to Earth to kill any stray organisms that might contaminate the results. Each of the three experiments essentially looked for Earth-like life by adding natural material to the Martian soil that could actually be eaten by organisms.
More signs that life could blossom with Jupiter's moon Europa
The results, which were later repeated continuously after the Viking landings landed in September, were confusing. The most encouraging result came from an analysis known as Marked Delivery, planned by researcher Gilbert Levin of Rockville, Maryland. Radioactive supplements were added to the Martian soil. Immediately, a large amount of radioactive gas spewed out – as if the creature had used supplements.
Then at this point the soil replica tests were heated to kill these (theoretical) organisms. Supplements were then applied and this time no gas was produced – as if the warming had killed the miniature Martians.
However, there were indications to the contrary. The "natural" response was questionably articulated, excessively high and too fast. The most damning piece of evidence was an instrument called a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, which looked for natural particles—the kind of complex atoms important to life on the planet. It looked like none.
"Soil Movement on Mars: Does It Signal the Presence of Life?" read the supported but extremely large headline on the first page of the August 1, 1976, post.
"Life may have been detected in the red sands of Mars today, but scientists have forewarned that the responses they get from the major Viking soil tests may be the result of the Red Planet's peculiar pedology," O'Toole wrote. .
The most persuasive researchers in the group, including Norman Horowitz of the California Establishment of Innovation, leaned toward the inorganic explanation. Horowitz saw a planet with almost no undeniable liquid water, natural particles, or an ozone layer that shields the surface from radiation. He hypothesized that Mars is covered in oxidizing particles that disinfect the surface much like hydrogen peroxide can clean a cut on the skin.
In his book "To Perfect world and Back", Horowitz gave a disturbing assessment of life on Earth: "Since Mars is by a wide margin the most encouraging natural environment for extraterrestrial life in the nearby group of planets, it is now virtually certain that Earth is the main planet bearing life in our system area. We woke up from a fantasy. We are distant from everyone else, us and the various species, indeed our family members with whom we share the Earth."
Terrible things on big planets
Viking was a resounding success on an innovative level, but the logical results came with a crash. Life drags on forever. No one fantasizes about sterile planets. It wasn't until 1997 that NASA conducted another test on Mars.
"It kind of went from wealth to clothing," Ben Clark, Martin Marietta's previous employee, says of Viking. "The local scientific field was left with such a distasteful image of a single planet."
John Grunsfeld, recently the top official in NASA's science directorate, said, "I think it stalled the Mars program for a considerable period of time."
Levin, regardless, did not change his rating of his Named Delivery survey. "I've been looking at it for a while. We're absolutely certain we've seen life," Levin said a week earlier.
The vast majority of the logical group of Vikings found Levin's case unconvincing. In the years since then, new evidence has certainly occasionally fueled the discussion.
The Phoenix lander found the compound perchlorate in 2008, an oxidant that could make sense of the clean surface. In any case, an interested wanderer found natural particles when he drilled a pair of climbers into the soil. Additionally, last year NASA provided tentative evidence of transient liquid water seeping along sandy, sun-warmed slopes. Positive thinkers trust in a "mysterious" life beneath the surface.
Mars may have made life easier for the couple quite a long time ago when the planet was warmer and had oceans and waterways. This was an alternate Mars before it lost most of its air and became dry and corroded. One example from Mars research is that terrible things can happen to large planets.
Sagan has widely reported that exceptional cases require unusual evidence. Life on Mars is an unusual case. Viking's evidence was vague, best case scenario.
Since Viking, NASA has been trying not to distinguish life on Mars in a straight line. Skeptics would agree that this is an example of a don't ask question, or you'd rather have the vaguest idea of the answer. But on the other hand, it is an impression of post-Viking logical humility.
NASA's methodology was to take a step back and look for possible sustainable conditions where water can remain in a liquid state.
The next meander, scheduled for deployment in 2020, will store the soil tests and keep them at the surface level. This fully anticipates a future example of a return mission, however such a mission, however high on the list of things for researchers to acquire, remains unfunded.
They worked for some time before they fell silent. Be that as it may, they were in a high circle where the thin atmosphere of Mars would offer almost no resistance. The designers at JPL who made the estimates believe they could be in a circle anyway.
0 Comments