On July 30, 2020, NASA launched its Mars Perseverance Rover.
Its mission?
Search indicators of life on the purple planet and acquire rock and soil samples to convey again for a possible return to Earth.
Right this moment you’ll be able to monitor the Perseverance Rover on-line whereas it trundles round Mars, see photographs of the planet taken by the rover, and even see the rock samples it has collected thus far.
Perseverance is the most recent in a line of NASA probes increasing our understanding of our neighbor within the photo voltaic system — however it began with Viking.
Viking 1 launched 48 years in the past this week and made historical past when it turned the primary spacecraft to land safely on Mars’ floor and ship photographs again to Earth. For NASA, Viking 1 and its successor program, Viking 2, have been a historic step within the company’s journey to search out indicators of life on one other planet.
A digicam crew captured the eruption of cheers from the scientists diligently monitoring the mission from the management room when Viking 1 touched down on Mars.
Quickly after, the primary photographs of the planet started to come back in. The second left an enormous impression, even on the youngest of spectators.
“I touched the monitor, as a result of that was the closest I may get to touching Mars,” stated Rachel Tillman, the founder and government director of the Viking Mars Missions Schooling and Preservation Venture.
Rachel’s dad, James E. Tillman, labored on Viking 1 and a couple of and was a professor within the Division of Atmospheric Sciences on the College of Washington.
Right this moment, Rachel Tillman works to protect the historical past of the missions by interviewing Viking scientists and researchers, publishing paperwork associated to the packages on-line, and sharing the tales of Viking 1 and a couple of with college students across the nation.
She stated she grew up surrounded by Mars-related information.
“We had stacks and stacks of printout paper all around the home that have been piles of actual information that was processed from the Viking landers on atmospheric sciences exams that had been accomplished on the Viking lander by my father,” Tillman stated.
She stated she remembers that a few of these stacks of papers have been OK to attract or doodle on. However others have been off-limits due to the valuable data they contained.
One of many most important goals of the Viking missions, Tillman stated, was to characterize the floor of the purple planet, and decide the mineral components and make-up of the floor of Mars. On the time, these issues have been an entire thriller.
“It was known as on the time ‘the seek for life,'” Tillman stated. “The true goal was to know if there have been indicators of biologic organics on or close to the floor.”
On the time, Viking scientists decided that, because of the lack of supporting proof from a number of scientific investigations, the seek for life on Mars was inconclusive. However the media on the time reported that the outcomes have been unfavorable.
“And because of actually pitching Viking to the general public as a seek for life mission, NASA bought a reasonably large black eye for that,” Tillman stated.
James E. Tillman went on to persuade NASA to switch the mission over to The College of Washington, the place he ran the Viking Computing Facility till the lander despatched its final sign in November 1982.
“There is a level at which every little thing involves an finish. And as unhappy as that was an occasion and my father was undoubtedly affected by it, deeply affected by it, that they had exceeded expectations,” Rachel Tillman stated. “And so they had already supplied and picked up sufficient information to affect all future Mars missions.”
Right this moment, the Viking Mars Missions Schooling and Preservation Venture focuses on preserving the artifacts, authentic paperwork, and information from the Viking Missions. Rachel Tillman has interviewed dozens of the remaining Viking researchers and scientists, together with her father, who handed away in March.
To Rachel Tillman, documenting the histories of those missions highlights not simply the technological developments of Viking, however the private sacrifices made by staff members and their households.
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