![]() “I spent seven years of my life averaging 60 hours a week working on Viking,” Lee said recently at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. First, he had to help land two spacecraft on Mars. He would later gain fame as a science fiction writer. Gentry Lee was one of the young, brash, long-haired engineers dedicated to the mission. ![]() Viking 1 went into orbit around Mars on June 19 Viking 2 was due to arrive in early August. The Viking mission launched two spacecraft, one trailing the other. But Viking had the potential to inject new life into the space program. The last Apollo landing had been four years earlier, and the space shuttle was still years from its inaugural flight. Watergate and Vietnam were fresh, painful memories. The Democrats were poised to nominate a peanut farmer and one-term Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter. Ford, an accidental president, occupied the White House, facing a stiff challenge on his right flank from Ronald Reagan. If you weren’t overreaching, you weren’t really trying.ġ976 was not only the nation’s 200th birthday, it was also an election year. But it was such a heady time, when so many boundaries had already been crossed, so many rules broken, so many truths shattered. Viking’s error might be described as scientific overreach.įorty years ago, the scientists and engineers tried to do too much too fast. That’s not because of a presumption that Mars is sterile, but because Viking showed that scientific questions have to be framed carefully. When rovers trundle across Mars today, they do not carry any life-detection instruments. “There could have been Nobel Prizes.”įorty years later, the Viking mission remains legendary - both for its triumphs and disappointments - and continues to cast a shadow over Mars exploration. “There was almost hanging in the air the possibility of people becoming famous overnight if we did discover life,” says Ben Clark, who worked for Martin Marietta, the company that built Viking under a NASA contract. No one could completely rule out the possibility that a Martian creature might go hopping by. A single image might solve the ancient mystery of extraterrestrial life. The lander also featured two cameras, which were life-detection instruments in their own right. They had placed three science experiments on board the Viking 1 lander, each of which would analyze Martian soil for signs of microbes. ![]() They wanted to do this on July 4 - the nation’s bicentennial. ![]() PASADENA, Calif - In the early summer of 1976, the engineers and scientists of NASA’s Viking mission hoped to do something no one had ever done before: land a fully operational spacecraft on Mars. Gentry Lee poses for a portrait in the Mars Science Laboratory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., on Thursday. ![]()
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