Saturday, January 20, 2018

Exploring Mars: 1977 "Viking Lander One" event cover


"Scientists still unsure of findings in search for life on Mars" states this oddly specific event cover for the "Viking Lander One Biology Instruments Shut Off" on May 30, 1977.

With one exception outlined below, I found very little online regarding the specific timelines of the biology instrumentation for the Viking 1 space mission to Mars and Viking lander biological experiments.

That exception was an awesome page on The Mars Society EspaƱa website that's filled with fabulous event covers related to the space-exploration programs of the 1970s. You should check it out for the images and run it through Google Translate if you don't know Spanish. According to this page, the scientific-instrument experimentation of Viking Lander 1 (VL-1) indeed ceased operations on May 30, 1977. VL-2 had ceased operations two days earlier. The two historic landers continued to send weekly images and meteorological date through the early 1980s.

Additional reading on this topic

Model of Viking Lander at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.
By Mark Pelligrino - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

No comments:

Post a Comment