Word: landers
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...electrifying announcement. At a hastily called press conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, last weekend, Viking Scientist Harold Klein reported that the newly begun biology experiments aboard the Mars lander had already shown a strange process-perhaps life-going on in the Martian soil. Said Klein: "We have at least preliminary evidence of a very active surface material. It looks at first indication very much like biological activity...
...rhapsodic mood in the mission-control room at J.P.L. was in sharp contrast to the tense atmosphere earlier that morning when the Viking 1 lander responded to a command by separating from the orbiter and beginning its 3-hr. 17-min. descent to the surface. Penetrating the Martian atmosphere, it shed its clamshell-like protective covering, deployed a 53-ft.-diameter parachute to slow its descent, and shortly before touchdown fired its retrorockets to brake its fall further. Engineers at J.P.L. watched nervously as the signals on their consoles marked the completion of each stage of the landing procedure. Because...
...Monsters. Once the first lander was safely down on Martian soil-thereby assuring at least partial success of the $1 billion, eight-year-long Viking project-scientists decided that they could afford to be less cautious with Viking 2, which is approaching Mars and scheduled to go into orbit on Aug. 7. Last week scientists were considering setting the second lander down in a rugged northern region that would be more hazardous for landing than Viking 1's site but potentially more interesting to geologists and biologists...
...beloved by generations of science-fiction writers. Said Exobiologist Carl Sagan: "The pictures do not suggest that the planet is filled, pole to pole, with living things." But, noted Sagan, nothing in the pictures ruled out the existence of life on the planet either. Soffen added that the lander's immediate vicinity held half a dozen niches in which conventional biology, including hundreds of life forms, could be detected in a desert on earth. "The microbes of Mars are within our grasp, if they are there," said Soffen. "There could be cockroaches under those rocks...
...Martian surface in earlier days; Viking's orbital pictures show that the planet is crisscrossed by dry "riverbeds" and sinuous valleys, including a deep Grand Canyon-like depression called the Valles Marineris, that were probably carved out by running water. During Viking's descent, the lander's instruments sniffed and measured both nitrogen (3%) and argon (1.5%) in the Martian atmosphere. Nitrogen is an essential element in the molecules of terrestrial life. Also, the presence of approximately the same percentage of argon found in the earth's air suggests that Mars at one time...