Word: lander
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...E.D.T.)-seven years to the day after the first men walked on the moon-this dream became a reality. "Touchdown! We have touchdown!" shouted Project Manager James S. Martin Jr. as he watched the consoles at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Only 17 sec. behind schedule, the lander was safely down on Mars' Chryse Planitia (golden plains...
Painted Desert. Like an apprehensive human who had plummeted from the sky onto alien soil, Viking first looked down at its footing, transmitting back to Pasadena the historic, if not dramatic first picture from the Martian surface. It showed one of the lander's round footpads resting upon an area of hard-packed soil strewn with pebbles and small rocks of varying sizes. At J.P.L., 212 million miles away, scientists could clearly see the rows of rivets on the lander's foot, late (Martian) afternoon shadows and-extending from rocks-dirt tails that might have been formed...
...about two miles away, was a ridge that could be the rim of a large impact crater from which many of the rocks may have been ejected. Scientists estimated that some of the boulders were as big as 12 ft. in diameter, large enough to have overturned the Viking lander had it put down in their midst...
...indicated that the landscape was littered with boulders ranging from 3 ft. to 15 ft. in diameter. Despite pressure from biologists anxious to begin Viking's life-seeking experiments, Martin decided that the risks at the second site were too great for the 1,270-lb., three-legged lander; to lose it on landing would leave the billion-dollar Viking mission totally dependent on Viking...
...moisten samples of Martian soil to determine if they contain organisms-will not keep long enough for all of the experiments scheduled. Even more vexing, Viking 2 is scheduled to arrive at Mars and go into orbit on Aug. 7. That will crowd the schedule of the Viking 1 lander, which will not begin to conduct its experiments until eight days after it lands. Each of the experiments requires an eleven-or twelve-day cycle, and if one of the experiments shows some promising results, it will have to be repeated twice more before scientists can state with confidence that...