REAL LIFE NEWS: HAPPY 40TH BIRTHDAY, VIKING MARS LANDER
by Hazed
Last Friday was the 40th anniversary of the Viking probe touching down on Mars. (I only found out about this when it was too late to include it in last week’s news.)
Viking 1 landed on the red planet on July 20, 1976. It was 16 days late – the plan was to touch down on July 4 to coincide with the celebrations for America’s bicentennial, but the planned landing site turned out to be too risky and the descent was delayed while another was found.
Viking was not the first probe to reach the Martian surface. The USSR’s Mars 3 lander in 1971 holds that record. However, after landing it lasted less than 15 seconds before dying.
Viking 1 therefore has the record for the first to send home pictures from the surface of Mars – within 25 seconds of landing it had snapped an image and sent it back, so within a day we had our first colour image which showed that the red planet really was red!
Like many of the probes that followed it, Viking 1 exceeded its planned lifespan – it was meant to last 90 days but it kept on broadcasting for six years, and only ceased then because of a botched software upgrade which trashed its computer. (Suspicions that the engineer responsible went on to work for Microsoft are wholly unfounded…)
Now, rovers trundling around Mars are quite commonplace so it’s easy to forget just what a feat the Viking 1 expedition was.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/20/40_years_since_viking_mars_probe/
