Word: lander
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...word "positive" translates as evidence of life processes in this summary by Harold Klein, biology team leader of the Viking mission, published about the time that the first U.S. lander went to work on the surface of Mars. Yet last November, after these same life-seeking experiments aboard both the Viking landers had shown apparently positive results in tests of Martian soil, Klein and other NASA scientists seemed unsure. In a Washington press conference summarizing the Viking findings, they announced that the results made it impossible to say that there was or was not life on Mars. That has remained...
...Gilbert Levin, principal Viking investigator in the microbe experiment, the evidence from the lander experiments strongly suggests biology: "Certainly whatever they have shown cannot easily be explained otherwise." Chief Project Scientist Gerald Soffen is less certain. "It is possible," he notes, "to formulate chemical equations to describe all the results we've had." Whether these are the right equations, though, remains to be determined. Adds Soffen: "It's not a question of finding a chemical explanation; we must find the chemical explanation, and we need a natural as opposed to a blackboard explanation...
...Viking 2 dropped silently out of space and bumped to a landing on Mars' Utopia Planitia (plains of Utopia), some 4,600 miles east-northeast and almost halfway around the planet from Viking 1 (see map). The landing gave scientists some anxious moments. Shortly after separation from its lander, the Viking 2 orbiter lost its "lock" on the star Vega and began to roll, breaking its contact with mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. But even as engineers worked feverishly to correct the problem with the orbiter, the lander was performing perfectly, coasting through...
Scientists lost no time in studying Viking 2's new surroundings. With signals that took 21 minutes to traverse the 228,670,000 miles from earth to Mars, they swiveled the lander's cameras around for a better look at the Utopia site and the planet's salmon-pink sky, triggered its seismometers so that it could listen for Marsquakes (similar devices on Viking 1 have failed to work) and switched on its weather station instruments...
Exotic Chemistry. But the devices that got the most attention were those in Viking 2's biology laboratory, the small (1 cu. ft.) package designed to detect life on Mars. This week the lander is to stretch out its robot arm, scoop up a sample of Martian soil and dump it into the minilab, which will repeat the three life-seeking experiments already performed by Viking 1. If the scoop works and all goes according to schedule, the results of these experiments could be in early next week...