NASA Langley Seminar: Viking 39th Anniversary (July 30, 2015)

Hey good afternoon, my name is Walt [inaudible] and I'm the director of the Space Technology and Exploration Directorate here at Langley and I want to welcome everybody. It was almost 39 years ago to the day that on July 20, 1976, the Viking-1 Lander successfully landed on the surface of Mars, and actually that was 40 years ago to the day that the Viking-1 Lander was launched to Mars. And with the arrival just a few weeks later the Viking 2 in September the same year that basically set the stage for NASA's future in Mars exploration. So just a quick show of hands, how many people were actually live in 1976 [laughter]? How many people remember the Viking Lander, very good? Well I happen to know that there are a couple of the old Vikings, sorry there are a couple of the Vikings more than a couple of the Vikings here in the audience so if I could-- if you actually worked on Viking could you just stand up. [ Applause ] >> So these are NASA's original Martians, so it's great to have you back here at Langley. I know we're in for a real treat today with John Newcomb who himself was one of the Viking management team. So he's going to share with us some of the Viking mission. I've been working with John on this little project for a couple of years. I was involved in some of the follow-on Mars projects, but working with John in the last few year or two and getting to know the history of Viking, what led up to Viking and how Langley came to lead the Viking missions is a fascinating story, so John is going to share that with you along with some of his cohorts. So before I do introduce John, I want to thank the Office of the Chief Engineer in Space Technology Game Changing Program here for helping sponsor this event and I'll give you a little background on John. He started his career here at Langley as a co-op, he was actually a student at Virginia Tech as part of the co-op program he worked on several of Langley's wind tunnels, a few of which we still have here [laughter]. He worked at some of the laboratories and what was at the time Langley's rocket test site up at the [inaudible]. After graduating from Virginia Tech he came here full-time to Langley as a young engineer. He quickly became involved in two of NASA's early space missions, the Lunar Orbiter project and the Viking project. John ultimately held several positions as part of the Viking management team and the Lunar Orbiter projects, these included positions of trajectory design manager for both missions, he also managed the development of the associated operational software and was the operations analysis manager for Viking responsible for developing the mission operations protocol by which the entire flight team conducted the mission. During the mission he was staffed at a site selection team as they looked for landing sites for the Viking Landers and I will tell you there's actually a team that's going to meet in just a few weeks down in Houston to look at sites on Mars for human missions, so think about how far we've come in 40 years. So John later went on to head up the physics and chemistry experiment space program, conducted experiments in the 0G environment of NASA's space shuttle and ISS, International Space Station. After retiring in 1984, he continued to consult with NASA and to this day he teaches courses on project management and systems engineering. So with that I'll welcome John Newcomb. [ Applause ] Thank you Walt. Yeah it was 39 years, 10 days that the Viking-1 landed on Mars. The first time anybody in this world that put a [inaudible] on that planet and I was privileged to work on that project. Today we're going to talk about Viking obviously. I'm going to give you a quick overview and then I'm going to talk about three questions, how did Langley become the project manager for Viking in the first place, why was it successful, and what technologies did we enhance in Viking? I will do that discussion and then we're going to have some panel members, Norm Crabill who was the mission design manager for Viking, Gus Guastaferro who was Jim Martin's deputy for management for Viking, and Paul Siemers who was in charge of the-- all the analysis for the entry descent and landing. And then our scientist, Joel Levine, who has studied the Viking results and many other science results on Mars 140 going to come up and talk about the Viking science results and how they have moved forward into today's world. Okay in looking at those three questions that I said I was going to attempt to answer. These are the guys that I talked to, to get their feelings as well. So you don't just have my feelings, in fact a lot of these people on this charter are in here today which is kind of scary, it means I got to get it right okay. And also if there's any intelligence in the remaining presentation you better blame them, they're the ones that put it there okay. Okay why did we do Viking okay? First we wanted to characterize Mars, understand Mars, and we did it three areas. First from orbit and we had cameras, we have thermal mappers, we had water detectors and we were characterizing Mars, but the big thing from all that was to find us a good landing site and Norm Crabill who is one of the panel members is going to talk about that in a little more detail. Then we had to understand the atmosphere, we didn't know anything about the atmosphere. We didn't know what it was made of, we didn't know what the pressures were, we didn't know anything. So we had to find that out while we were doing the mission. And then finally, we had to characterize Mars from the surface, surface properties, magnetic properties, meteorology, but the big one was the search for life okay. So that's why we were there. We formed the project office in 1968, seven years later we had the first launch of Viking and then almost over 300 days later we had to take type 2 trajectories took a lot longer to get there, over 300 days later we arrived at Mars with the landing on July 20th. Actually this is Viking 2, but it's on the titan-centaur ready to go. In an interplanetary trajectory this is what Viking looked like. This area from here on up is the orbiter with the standard solar panels, the stand platform with the water detectors, cameras, etcetera, velocity control, engine [inaudible] and so forth, standard kind of stuff. From this structure on down is the Viking encapsulated in its cocoon for maintaining sterilization okay and we're going to talk more about that later. Once you got to Mars and Viking landed and unfolded everything it looked like this with the exception of the fact Carl Sagan wasn't there [laughter]. But just in case there's any doubt about that, he did lots of things, but this wasn't one of them okay [laughter]. So up here you got the high gain antenna, you got the meteorology, this is one of the two lander cameras, this is one of the terminal descent engines and so on. Now the question is how do we become project managers for Viking to begin with? Well in order to talk about this there's a whole lot we could say, but basically I got to take you back to 1960, now we go a long way back, we're at the beginning of the Apollo era, we didn't put a man on the moon until 1969 okay. And the Voyager Mission was introduced and this was huge, this was bigger than life, it turned out to be much bigger than NASA could afford as well. It was to be launched on a Saturn 5, the same thing we used for Apollo, so you can see this thing was huge. It had an orbiter and lander and the idea was to use that to explore Mars and Venus. During the next ensuing years many studies were conducted, but one thing came out of those studies, it became clear that Langley should be the lander system manager with whatever we did to go to Mars, Langley ought to manage the lander system because Langley studies always came out much, much better than anybody else's. In 1967, the cost caught up with it and Voyager was canceled okay. Now we've canceled Voyager, but there's still a lot of pressure to do something and I captured this quote from Harry Hess, he was chair of Space Science Board in the National Academy of Sciences and his comment is, great discoveries in this area can only be made once, shall succeeding generations look back on the 70s as the great era of soviet achievement while we did not accept the challenge. That's a pretty tough statement coming from the National Academy. Well he had good reason to be worried. By the time we launched Viking-1975, Russia had launched 14 spacecraft to Mars, none of them worked, but they launched 14 spacecraft. Several of them were landers okay. When I say none of them worked I've always got to do the caveat. One of them made it to the surface and actually broadcast information for 20 seconds and I did that in quotes because it broadcast 20 seconds of the Russian national anthem [laughter]. Absolutely no data. Okay. The scientists were worried because they were worried about Russia contaminating the planet okay. NASA was worried because we have had all these people that were working on [inaudible], Lunar Orbiter, Surveyor, and if you don't have something to follow on, then this area of expertise will be dispersed and it's going to be very difficult to pull it back together. So later in 67 headquarters asked a few centers, Langley included, to give us a more modest program nothing as expensive as Voyager was going to be and Langley was assigned the management responsibility for developing what we called at that time the Titan Mars 1973 orbiter and lander. And Jim Martin who had been the deputy project manager to Cliff Nelson on Lunar Obiter was set up as the project manager for that activity. Now several studies, in fact several, many studies were done, you all remember those you Vikings. While we were doing this and the arguments began. Who's going to manage what and we had three things, orbiter, lander and project. It was very clear that JPL ought to manage the orbiter. We were going to use [inaudible] their spacecraft, they had flown a few of them by that time, hands down. Langley ought to manage the lander we had proven that in the earlier studies. The big one was who manages the project. Langley had demonstrated it had an extremely strong management team on Lunar Orbiter and on other missions. We had certainly demonstrated we had a strong technical team and the landers came. The lander is where you're going to do your science, the whole purpose of this mission is to get to the surface of Mars and institute science on Mars. And the orbiter is a service vehicle, the orbiter is going to carry us there, it's going to find a place to land, and you know then it can go out and do its own business. Well it wasn't as cut and dry as that, but that's the idea. So the Viking project office was set up at Langley in December of 1968 and Langley was the project manager. Now that we've got Langley, I'm sorry Langley, Viking-- now that we've got Viking why was it successful? And in order to answer that I've got about four different things I want to look at. One was manager, then the team, there was some major project decisions made that were extremely important in Viking's success, I hate doing that. And we had some methodologies that were very important. When I talk management, I got to talk these three guys. You got Jim Martin who was hard driving, straight shooting, absolutely honest and required honesty and required performance. He set the culture. You had Israel Taback, better known as Is, who was without a doubt the most impressive engineer I've ever worked with who always forced you back to basics and always asked the right question. He was chief engineer. And then center director at that time was Ed Cortright and Ed Cortright was the bulldozer, he ran down the road ahead of us and got the rocks out of the way so the project could move forward and he was excellent and dedicated to that. In fact, when we were meeting various people Ed would lots of time say I'm Ed Cortright and I work for Jim Martin [laughter] and he was serious. Okay the team. Many of us had worked together on Lunar Orbiter so we knew each other, we had respect for each other and so forth. It was a highly motivated team, we were working-- highly motivated and highly dedicated. I love this one quote one of the guys said, he said we were crazy people, we worked days and nights and weekends and we worked some days we didn't even knew were days, you know. We were that way. We had a strong technical team. The management came from hands-on environment, many from the sounding rocket program at Wallops, many from working on the bench earlier in their career developing hardware and so forth. And I got to put this and I wanted it to show up a little more, but the team included the Langley support personnel, engineers and technicians. Because we in the project office would find problems, but then we would go into Langley and say we need your help and they always helped, they always came through. And they were an extremely important part, they were absolutely a part of the team even though they weren't in the office. Communication, we had all kinds of communication personal and so forth. We had reviews, oh Lord did we have reviews. But there was one important thing about the reviews, we always focused on the problems not the feel good stuff. Gus Guastaferro who you will hear later on, I've heard him say a hundred times, we always concentrated on the hole not the donut. We concentrated on the problems that needed to be worked. We had a fantastic science team. There were many Nobel laureates, guys like Carl Sagan, others and we brought them early on and they were part of all the decisions that were made on the project. This is a picture of the team during Mission Operations voting on a landing site. They voted, there was one vote that counted and Jim had it, but they voted, he even wanted to get their opinion. They even decided what science instrument [inaudible], we had four biology instruments to begin with, we needed to go down to three they were the ones that decided which three would go okay. Extremely important. I like this, we built a team and then we could build Viking. Now I'd like to talk about these four major decisions because these were made long before you got operations, but they influenced ever so greatly the operations okay. The first was the mission mode. When we were looking at Viking we looked at direct entry out of orbit, hard lander, soft lander, long duration, short duration, flyby orbiters. We looked at every permutation and combination you could think of. And we proposed to Naugle and Paine, Paine being the associate administrator, I'm sorry NASA administrator at that time, two options. One was direct entry with a soft lander and a long duration lander and a flyby orbiter. Another was out of orbit soft lander, orbiter and lander have extended life. And it was option two that Paine and Naugle selected. And that to me was extremely important. The best we had as far as information about what Mars looked like was a thousand meter resolution for Mariner. You could stack up a bunch of battleships on Mars and you couldn't see them okay and we selected our sites based on thousand meter resolution. We ended up rejecting every site that we had preselected and so to me this says we just didn't know enough, we did not know enough to do a direct entry at all and that out of orbit decision was extremely important to the success of Viking and Norm is going to hit that a little more too. Another was the launch date slip. We had just kind of gotten going on Viking and Congress reduced our funding and we had two choices. We could go back to Congress and say we know you reduced our funding, but we can still make 73 okay and we would have made a whole bunch of bad decisions. Schedule driven decisions, low cost driven decisions and we might have gotten halfway down the road and had to slip to 75 anyway after having made those decisions. So we did go ahead and slip to 75 and that was a major, major decision. Arrival times at Mars. I got to set the stage a little on this one. First the Viking Lander was designed for plus or minus 30 degrees latitude okay and while the science team was trying to figure out exactly what the landing sites would be, we got some information that there might be water at the higher latitudes up to 60 degrees north. So there was a whole push to go up there. There were many discussions and many negotiations, but finally the decision was reached Lander-1 will go to 20 north. If Lander-1 is successful Lander-2 will go to 45 north. If Lander-1 is not successful, Lander-2 will go to 5 south because that's the area we thought was the safest area on Mars based on what we knew at that time. So that was the preflight mission rule if you will. Now at that time we had 30 days between separation between arrivals of Viking-1 and Viking 2 at Mars okay. And we started the mission operations strategy development, you can call it the mission operations protocol. It's the process by which the flight team conducts the mission from the scientist saying I think I'd like to do this until you have commands coming out of [inaudible], what is that process in between? That's what we call a mission operations strategy. When we reviewed this with Viking project management council, the decision came back there's too much going on during these arrival times, it's just way too much. We've got to spread these out, we got to spread them out to 50 days and that's what we did. Now fast-forward you to mission operations. We got to Mars, abandoned the prime site for Lander-1, abandoned the backup site, went into a mapping mode and finally got Lander-1 on the surface 32 days after arrival. Then the surface sample arm wouldn't work. Now if the surface sampler arm doesn't work Viking-1 is a failure because you can't deliver soil to the biology instruments and we have to go to 5 south. If we can get it working we go to 45 north. On day eight and if you add those up you get to 40, on day eight the surface sampler delivered soil to the biology instrument, we got it fixed, it turned out to be relatively simple or at least in hindsight it looked simple. And we were 10 days out, we had to make our last midcourse maneuver 10 days before arrival at Mars. The last midcourse maneuver was dependent on the landing site latitude which was dependent on whether or not Viking-1 was successful. So 10 days out we made the last midcourse maneuver and we headed for 45 north. Now we used every hour of those 50 days, every single hour. Now I got a question, if we held the original 30 day separation where would Lander-2 be and I'll give you an honest answer, I haven't a clue [laughter] and I really mean that. And I really don't have a clue where 1 would be okay. So that was an extremely important decision that was made way before you had all the problems. This was another kind of related decision, but it was as a result of that same kind of a problem. When we originally found that we could launch in 75, arrive in 76, we found that we could land on July 4th, so of course that was the plan. We were going to land on July 4th. We put that out to all the press, everybody. Then, of course, we didn't do it and there was a lot of pressure. While we were sitting there looking at the prime, the backup site for Lander A, there was a lot of pressure saying-- from politically saying, well isn't it good enough, can't you just go ahead, you. Well we didn't know that. You know, Jim Martin, that didn't worry him a bit. The part that was interesting to me was after the decision not to land on the 4th and we were trying to find a good site was the press. They became very excited about the fact that we weren't going tell them when we could land. And one day in a press conference one of these guys really kind of came on aggressive and Tom Young was taking-- Tom Young was mission director, Tom was taking the answers and taking the questions and the guy came on, you know, you told us you were going to land on the 4th and you're not obviously and you're not even going to tell us when, when are you going to tell us when you're going to. You know that kind of an operation. Jim Martin was sitting beside Tom, he reached over and he says I'll take this question. We will land when I consider it safe to land and not one minute before and that kind of put the kibosh on these press guys who were pushing us hard. Now another reason I think we were successful was the way we worked with contractors. We had a manager for every major subcontract that Martin and JPL had and that manager was responsible to Jim Martin for the execution of that subcontract, performance, cost and schedule. Just as though he were a Martin guy managing that subcontract, in this case we had the guy right in the project office who was responsible for that contract and we did all kinds of things with regard to those subcontracts. Honeywell was having a problem with the computer, we found out how to fix the computer and then told Honeywell. In fact, we got Honeywell over to GE so GE could tell them. We took over jobs that weren't getting done. Gus remembers this one because the GCMS, gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, was contracted under JPL and it wasn't getting done. Jim sent Gus out there to evaluate the situation. We ended up taking the contract away from JPL, bringing it here to Langley, took them completely out of the loop, brought the contracts, rewrote the contracts [inaudible] to us, took them out of the loop and completed the job. There were some teams that weren't working. There was a camera team and Martin and ITEC were sharing the development of the camera, it wasn't getting done. We ended up firing the team okay, we ending up causing Martin [inaudible] to fire the team and I will say that having done that they brought in a team of hotshots and they got the thing done. So we worked extremely closely with all of the subcontracts even though they were to Martin or JPL. We pushed technology in every area you could think of and in most cases or many cases you've got a technology-based to work on and you extend that, you build on it. Well Viking did a lot of extending, Viking did a lot of extending and applying the technology for the first time and there was some places where we developed a first and there were some places where we developed not only a first, but an enduring technology, ones that others have picked up and used after Viking. And one of those was enter, descent and landing and Paul Siemers is going to talk in more detail about that. One of the technologies was what we typically call the sterilization of Viking, but it was really broader than that, it was the biological protection of another planet. We had this rule that we were not going to (a) contaminate Mars or b) we were not going to take any biota into Mars and then discover them and then say whoopee we found life, you know. So this kind of a requirement filtered throughout the entire lander. Hydrazine was [inaudible] for the terminal descent engines, it loves water. Anytime it gets close to water it just soaks some up. We had to have-- we could not spray water on the surface of Mars. We had to figure out not only how to dry the hydrazine, but then how to maintain it throughout all the processes that it was going to have to go through before it finally got into the tanks. Tape recorder, normally you can just use a normal old tape, well that contains hydrocarbons, can't use that, got to use a metal tape. So with this requirement filtered throughout the [inaudible] and of course sterilization, you had to make sure that there weren't any little microbes crawling around anywhere. So we sterilized components as they came in, but then when we put them all together, we finally encapsulated them in the cocoon shown here, the bioshield cap and base, hermetically sealed them and then we put them in the oven and we cooked the whole thing at 120 degrees for 40 hours. Okay now we're dealing with 1960's technology, take your phone and throw it in the oven do that and then try to make a phone call, I dare you okay. But that was the sterilization. Inside that cocoon, here's the lander are all folded up, here's the bait-- here's the part that actually goes into the atmosphere, here's the base cover with the parachute and the mortar here, here's the aeroshell down here, I'm sorry here's the aeroshell down here. All of these clamshells together as the entry vehicle and then you had your bioshield base and cap that basically was the cocoon. Another technology, well not another technology, the technology I've mentioned a couple of times, was the whole entry, descent and landing, which Paul again will talk about. But we didn't know anything about Mars again, I got to tell you and I got to kind of push that a little bit. We didn't know what the atmosphere was made of, we didn't know what the density was, and so we were going to a surface of unknown altitude, unknown varying strength, unknown slopes, and unknown rock size. Other than that we had it made [laughter]. And we had to build a lander that would be capable of working with whatever it encountered. Now here's the enter, descent and landing schematic if you will. First you've got your separation, then the lander would make [inaudible] appropriately for the entry, then at a certain altitude pop the chute and get rid of the aeroshell at the altitude mark, get rid of the parachute and the engines at this point had been ignited, and fly on down to the surface and that's the sequence you would go through. Terminal descent engines, the last thing that you need to get down to the surface. That was another complete development and it kept-- I can't remember who it was on the top 10 list for Viking for quite a while. Originally, the enter, descent and landing engine had 5 inch nozzles. We had three engines and each one had one nozzle and it was 5 inches and it produced a pretty healthy plume. And in the rarefied atmosphere of Mars that plume didn't dissipate, it was like a drill when we tested it. And so we had to do something else. So we ended up going to 18 nozzles, each with 1 inch opening and these plumes obviously were much shorter and would finally dissipate before they damaged the surface. But that was an enduring technology that has been used. Adaptive mission operations was another one, oops I'm sorry. Adaptive mission operations was another one. In many cases up until Viking, the missions had been basically preprogrammed okay. You're going to make a flyby of Mars, well you preprogram the whole thing and set the spacecraft on its way and boom, boom, boom it does its thing and so on. We had to have a very robust mission operations strategy that would allow for real-time mission design and we used that extremely, I guess is the way to say it. Before we got Lander-1 on the surface we'd made a dozen trim maneuvers in the orbit because we got to over here and look, no that don't look good. We got to go over here and look, no that don't look good either. So all these maneuvers had to be done. Observation sequences were changed continually to get the best photographs back-- to get number one, the photographs taken and then the best photographs back that you could get. In the lander, of course, we responded to anomalies, but the interesting part about the lander was we operated it like you would operate in your laboratory. In your laboratory you'll go in there and you'll conduct some kind of experiment and then you'll get some kind of answer and then you say, well gee whiz I'd like to do this next. Well we did that with the lander, only the lander was sitting-- we did that in our laboratory, only our laboratory was sitting on Mars. It was a very adaptive process, not only in the orbiter, but in the lander. Here's the orbiter on a lander, wow here's the lander sitting on Mars, and we had some more technology. The biology instrument, the biology instrument really was three different experiments and they would fill a normal sized laboratory. Now I've got to take those three instruments, I got to package them in a 1 foot cub and put them in the lander and not only that, by the way, they've got to withstand sterilization. And I've got to do the same kind of thing with the gas chromatograph mass spec. This was a real intense operation, miniaturizing and packaging that instrument, that's a schematic of the biology, instrument going into its little case there. The lander camera, the camera were, there were two of these and they were on a staff-- two of each on a staff on the lander. They had a mirror that nodded up and down for elevation and then you rotated the cylinder for [inaudible] and this camera would then scan, move, scan and so forth and produce a picture. The servos on those two devices that would move that and move an [inaudible] had to be as smooth as silk because you couldn't get a jump, you'd end up with a hole or you'll end up both on overlap or whatever. Those servos were unbelievably difficult I would say. Also in the camera and I just listed because I can't remember it, you had all the high-resolution sensors, you had different focal distances, I think four, three visual color detectors, three infrared, a whole command module, 10 preamps, 1000 wire [inaudible] and you get them all in about a 2 and a half inch cylinder. It was another, not only technology with packaging, packaging issue. However, it was that picture, well that camera gave us the first picture ever taken from the surface of Mars and this is it okay. And the first question you're always going to ask me is Newcomb you had this beautiful landscape you could've taken this picture of this landscape out here and you took the picture of the footpad, what are you talking about? One good reason, we wanted to understand what the varying strength of that surface was. We wanted to understand how the surface would respond to the footpads-- to the landing legs. And so one of the initial reaction was to take a picture that included that footpad. That was the first. This is one of the last pictures taken prior to conjunction, this is Viking-2 and this picture was taken just prior to conjunction when the earth was going to come between earth and Mars, sorry sun come between earth and Mars and we would lose radio contact for about a month. And so this was one of the last pictures we took prior to conjunction which I thought would be kind of a neat thing to show here. One thing that scares me when I look at this picture, look at the size of those rocks. Geologists swore we'd have sand dunes, we didn't. The lander was designed I think for 90 days, the orbiter was designer for I think six months, but we did okay. Lander-1 lasted five and a half years, Lander-2 three and a half years, orbiters four years and two years. The technologies worked. And when you think about this whole thing, maybe the biggest of all the technology challenges was to take all of the many varied technologies, develop them, and then integrate them into a system that successfully landed on Mars. Thank you. [ Applause ] Now you're going to have a chance to hear some other people other than me and the first person I'd like to bring up, a member of our panel, is Gus Guastaferro. He was deputy project manager to Jim Martin for management and then after Viking he went onto planetary programs, director in headquarters, and went on to finally Lockheed Space Systems as a vice president for civil and space civilian space projects. He also was the one that took over the GCMS when in its darkest days and made an instrument out of it. He now works with William and Mary in the Mason School of Business. So with that, Gus. [ Applause ] >> Well it's a pleasure to be here, the alternative is horrible [laughter]. Before I start to talk about Viking, I want to play a special tribute to my good friend here. He's documented the Viking story as well as the Lunar Obiter story in a book called A Bunch of Plumbers and it will be published in about two weeks John? >> Yeah. >> And I encourage you to do it, I've had the privilege of reading it in its early days and recently and it's about to be released. You wonder about the title with somebody that wrote about space called a bunch of plumbers. It's explained in the book and it's very instrumental in the Langley story and that is that Dr. Harold Urey, Nobel laureate out of the University of San Diego, at the time of the decision to let Viking be led by Langley Research Center. Harold Urey wrote it and he said it's a terrible decision, there's nothing but a bunch of plumbers working at Langley and how the hell could they lead a scientific program and that became the title of John's book, A Bunch of Plumbers [laughter]. I encourage you to get access to it when it's published. John did a terrific job of giving you a singular experience in a broad base that led me to say, I could tell my story hopefully in five minutes without a bunch of charts. That's one thing I learned when I left Langley, how to give a presentation without a stack of view graphs or what's now PowerPoint and so we'll see how it comes out today. John, you want to give me the next one? >> Okay. >> And I didn't bring the clicker with me. >> Okay. >> That's the only one I'm going to use. I want to raise a couple of principles here that Langley needs to think about as they go to the future programs because a lot of vast opportunity is out there in terms of what we're going to do in this country in further exploration of Mars and even beyond the solar system. It's interesting that one of the principles that helped us carry this out and this was very critical in Jim Martin's thinking and with the team, we became science driven rather than aeronautics, rather than space, rather than technology, we were science driven. And what that characteristic provided was that we got ourselves a biologist to lead the science program and some of you might remember him, Dr. Gerald Soffen. We on top of that brought 72 scientists onboard from the universities around the country and they participated in 1968 through 1976 in defining this mission. They participated in every engineering decision we made, every design decision, every operational decision, and that was the keystone to making it a successful program because we never lost sight of what our customer was. Our customer was knowledge and science and not an engineering trick and we focused that on the whole team continuously. That led to some of the things that John talked about in principle. The second thing is in contrast to Dr. Urey and with all do respects to him, Langley got selected for these three principles. Based on the planetary entry technology they knew about, studying they understood the atmospheres, both from an [inaudible] and space viewpoint, and they could handle the challenges that were concerned with landing on another surface. The second thing was Lunar Orbiter success. Five successful missions in the 60s leading up to what became the Apollo program and selecting the landing sites. And the bunch of plumbers here produced a fantastic program and demonstrated very strongly that we could carry it out. And the last thing was the science management approach that we were not going to walk down the aisle without being married to the scientist in the United States and the world really because we had some from other countries. And that became really the crux of-- John laid out a wonderful roadmap and I'm going to try to tell you little bit about some of the things that were done to navigate this roadmap to a successful mission. And as I mentioned, the PIs and we gave them that title even though there was 72 of them, they were all called PIs or co-PIs and they got to participate in every decision and brought from their universities their talent to every decision we made. There were over 400 meetings between 1968 and 1976 and a lot of airline tickets because it was in the days before data management systems allowed us to do it on, you know, from what do you call it today, that allows you to stay home and work. >> Telecommute. >> Yeah telecommute. We didn't telecommute. I've got to tell you a funny story about airplanes. We had in the days and [inaudible] will remember this more than anybody from his days in Congress. NASA budgets in the time of Viking were set with two separate things, the salaries of government employees and the travel budget was in one set of budgets. The project budget was separate and therefore, that was for the contracts we had and for supporting the scientists and we didn't have enough travel money. And one of the interesting stories of the techniques of Jim Martin type of approach was how were we going to beat the travel restrictions on this very complicated program we set out to do with the vast army of people we had working the project and how we were going to go without travel money? So we said, gee we're allowed to have a contract and if we could look at some of the things we're doing and take some of the project money and give Martin Marietta, who is our prime contractor, some funding out of that and they could come in with their executive jet which was stationed by the way in Maryland and it would be easy to fly through Langley as they drove us to Denver to take care of our problems. And for two years we operated that way and we offset a lot of travel money so the rest of the center could go do their technology things. And it finally caught up to us in about the fourth year of the project, but we didn't start this until about the second year of the project and we had to admit that we needed our wrists exposed and slapped very strongly for misusing appropriated funds, but we got the job done [laughter]. We never lost focus that we had to keep the scientists involved and we did what we had to do. The second thing I wanted to mention with Walt's help, when I originally took this job with John I had a 17 element PowerPoint presentation and a five-minute allocation and you can't put 17 charts in a five minute bag. So I'm going to send this presentation, which you're not going to hear to Walt and anybody interested in it that I'm going to comment on it within the five minute limit and then Walt will help you get a copy of it. It's worthwhile looking at it, not because I've done it, but there's an interesting set of experiences. From there let me move on. I always use the expression that we-- and John used this in his book, we talked our way to Mars. We didn't have a spec and so we did things by significantly talking to the scientific community. For example, I mean my personal experience with the GCMS I had to take it over from JPL and that was a tough decision to make. I was the project manager leaving my management job for Jim to run that project. The first thing I did was go to MIT and walk into the GCMS, it's a laboratory that fills this room and that's what they used every day to do molecular analysis. And we were putting this thing in a cubic foot that weighed 40 pounds, that's all we were allocating for it. All of a sudden you start feeling the challenges and that type of technique of seeking out the best knowledge and then working with MIT and Dr. Klaus Beermann and taking the problems that were existing at JPL when we took over the project, we quickly got set up and I moved to California for the time period and took over the everyday management of getting the GC MS built. Because if you don't get it there you don't have the instrument and you just have to-- but that was only an example of the type of technique. When we ran into problems with the computer, Is Taback and Phil [inaudible] who is here with us today, took over that project from whatever else they were doing to make sure that we got it settled so we had a computer to go. Because the jump we took in plated wire memory was going to give us the inability not to communicate. And it was important that we make that very strong step. There's a whole bunch of other things that were important to the team and that was Jim Martin had a technique of project leadership. That you had to organize to win. Now how do you organize to win and this is part of the paper I put together? You had a team with people that have experience. So even though we might look that we were competitors to JPL and we had what is now the Glenn Research Center doing the launch vehicle. Jim Martin worked very strongly on forming an NASA team that was going to do Viking led by Langley Research Center and they became people that participated every day. This thing that John mentioned about assigning accountability rather responsibility, allowed people to look at what I call the triangle of cost, schedule, performance with risk slash through it that says, that every decision has to be focused on the mission and has to be thought about in terms of trade-offs. And therefore when schedule becomes your driver and we talked about what happened to the 73 75 launch. We soon found out that we'd have to give up so much technical performance and so much cost that we couldn't get. So when two of the variables got frozen we changed the schedule and we went two years later and we did that at the risk of losing the program, but we were honest, we were direct and it helped solve to get a good mission that could be done. And rather than what becomes fashionable today, say anything to keep the program and then you have to live with the pains of that decision, we decided to do that. Another thing I remember most about Viking was effective communications. Jim believed in a strong ethical shop that we told the truth all the time that we concentrated on our problems, and they got-- and we put the resources on to get the problems solved. And then when that was done we rewarded people when that happened. We didn't concentrate our time for somebody having a problem and then firing them, we concentrated on helping them resolve their problems, giving them the right skills and people to get the thing resolved. Probably the other thing I should have mentioned up front is that we had a concentration on not process, but people make things happen. And when you design a winning team and you talk about people that are going to carry out their accountability for the project, you'd better get the best people you can get. And if you don't have them and we have many examples on Viking in what I call the invisible badge where didn't have enough people from a control viewpoint to control the resources on the project, we went to General Electric and Valley Forge and gave them a support engineering contract because they had been doing things for the Navy and we brought a team of people here that some of them still work at Langley. We hired a support contractor to help us carry out tasks that we couldn't fit into the normal makeup of the people that we had and we carried that other. The last thing I want to talk about is the golden rule. Now the golden rule isn't what you think it is, it says he who has the golden rules and what does mean? That means that you build a situation where you get a significant amount of reserves and schedule and cost to have sufficient goal to adjust the program. Therefore, you make the decision and not somebody else and when you're in that kind of a category, you could do a lot with that. And then the strongest lesson learned is always remember who your customer is and the customer was not the President of the United States, the customer was the scientists of the United States. And if you never take your eye off that ball you'll have a very, very successful mission. I'm going to turn it over to Norm Crabill now or John are you going to introduce him? [ Inaudible Comment ] Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Norm was mission designer manager for both lunar orbiter and Viking. And then he was executive secretary on the landing site staff during the tumultuous time when we were trying to find lading sites for Viking A and B. And not just executive secretary, although that was an extremely import job, he was a significant part of that landing site selection activity. And then after Viking he worked to bring weather into the cockpit of the airplane, in other words the pilot now has the capability to see exactly what the meteorologist back in his office sees. And then lightning protect aircraft where he was able to fly into storms and get hit as much as 70 times in one storm while he was testing that operation. And now he's still working on all kinds of advanced aeronautics [inaudible]. So with that let me turn it over to Norm. >> Thank you John. [ Applause ] Well I'm really impressed that there's so many people here interested in all this ancient history, but I want to tell you guys, you younger guys, you got a chance to beat this. >> Oops. >> So hang on John. >> I'm sorry I jumped the gun. >> I want to just spend two minutes of my time on expanding on the theme that Viking was a very old and ambitious mission because it accomplished in one mission what would probably have taken 8 or 10 years if we had done it what I call the safe way. The safe way would okay send some orbiters to Mars to get what knowledge you can from orbit, what's the surface like in detail and then send some direct entry atmospheric probes and then you can design and build the lander and the orbiter and test them knowing what you got to encounter. And then you would fly mission one and oops I learned something I didn't expect, so we'll make changes and fly mission two. That's what I call the safe way. We didn't do it that way, we used the best available data and some engineering guesses to design and build and test our equipment and because of the mission design and the improvement in technology, we had fantastic resolution in our orbiter imagery and we used that and the data from Arecibo radar in Puerto Rico to get surface details. And we had an ops team that could handle what it's, you heard something about that. Because if you go there and you don't know exactly what you're going to encounter, you got to react to what you do and do the right thing. Now one of the things that Is Taback told me, God what a man, he's the best engineer I ever met. When it came time to start the Viking lander design, it's going to land on the surface, but what's the surface like. And at that time the best available data, this was early, very early in the project, the best available data came from a mariner 4 flyby of Mars with the available imagery technology and it's turned out that this strip of Mars that it scanned as it zoomed by, hey that looks like the moon, but we know all about the moon and it's pretty smooth. All those black splotches you see are volcanic outflows and they're smooth. So we designed the lander and if you remember that picture that John showed, the distance between the bottom of the lander and the surface was about that much because it's smooth. So okay let's have the first John. >> Okay. >> Marine 71 went into orbit with improved technology, imagery technology and they found this site, they imaged Mars and we found the site by looking at it that that's pretty smooth. One of the reasons the scientists picked this site for us, there was a canyon here, Grand Canyon would have been invisible, this was 3,000 kilometers long and 15,000 feet deep and 150 miles wide and it had water in historic times and it came out and it flowed this way and you can see the flow lines around these islands. Well we're looking for life, life means where was the water and so there was a few gallons of water in that site, so that's our site, 20 degrees north roughly. And that's the landing dispersion and yeah we got to look out for the few bumps up in the north end and a few wrinkles down here, but hey that's pretty good. So next, we took pictures from orbit with improved resolution, oh boy. You can see evidences of the outflow here just ripping by there and guess what, it's likely channeled [inaudible] and Washington State on the Columbia River. A lot of rocks and boulders, oh what's that ground clearance, about that much. I don't think we're going to do it. So bump it. We started moving the orbit and taking pictures moving to the west and that strip there was not encouraging, well that's a little bit better. Let's keep moving west. Next, so. We kept moving-- by the way this is about 1,500 kilometers away from my original site and you know how many days. And looking at the imagery and these wiggly lines are the radar returns from the Arecibo radar in Puerto Rico, we're very lucky because the planetary geometry was such that it could get coverage. It had a problem, the dish is fixed in the ground, but we got data and part of my job was to feed that data into the landing site selection committee and so we were looking-it shows the reflectivity goes from 5 percent over here to 8 percent at gamma site there. But it was smoother to east and more craters as you go this way. So Jim says, okay we're going to land here and that's what we did. So we didn't, you know, we got a big surprise when we got there. We had to do something in real time and we were able to do it and land successfully and next picture John. We thought we were getting away from the rocks [laughter]. But it worked and for Viking site 2, we hoped that Hank [inaudible] said, you guys got to pick a better less rocky site. Now this one is going to be about 40 45 degrees north, further north, closer to the water at the poles and we stand at latitude, I don't know how many weeks, but we finally at a point we were looking at four different mission profiles and that's a lot of work for a flight team that was supposed to do one at a time. So Jim said stop we're going to go for this site, do the mission profile for that, cut down the risk of making a mistake in the sequencing could be fatal. So we landed with one final look at the site [inaudible] says okay, let's go. So next one, oh I forgot [laughter]. No this, I forgot this is the Pathfinder in 1997. It landed at our original site the one that we rejected and they had bounced down on a balloon, they're a soft lander and it worked. And fortunately it didn't puncture the balloon, but Golembek at JPL said he made the right decision not to land Viking there. So then we went on-- okay now John. This is a Viking lander 2 and the geologist said there would be 25 feet of sand over the rocks and when I asked him the question where the hell is the sand, he said didn't you know it's 70 degrees north [laughter]. Now you tell me. Well I just wanted to hit just a few things because between John and Gus they've given you the overall picture. But there were some things in there that just were big surprises and you had to be able to react to the reality of what you got and we did. I did my five minutes. [ Applause ] >> Well okay now that we found the landings site, Paul is going to tell you about getting to the land side from orbiter. Paul was responsible for all of the analysis and testing of the entry, descent and landing system in order to get us safely to the surface. And then after Viking Paul continued to do a lot of research on the space shuttle using the shuttle as an actual test vehicle and he is the only guy that I've ever known that can convince Houston to drill a hole in the nose cap of the shuttle. >> Fourteen. >> Huh? >> Fourteen holes. >> Fourteen holes, excuse me. So he's pretty tenacious okay. So with that Paul. >> Thank you. Well John has promised you that I'm going to tell you a lot of stuff and then he gave me five minutes and Walt told me I couldn't have any view graphs, so I don't know how I'm going to accomplish all this, but I'll do the best I can. First I want to say this about people, I was very fortunate to be at the right place at the right time to become a part of Viking. It was a wonderful experience, I worked with fantastic people at Langley, both in the project and outside the project and I look back at it, it was a great experience and I thank you all. Okay first of all I want to clarify one thing, at Langley's period we had not coined the phrase EDL, we were split in different ways. I was responsible for the aero thermodynamics resource required to characterize the performance of the vehicle, I didn't do anything more than go to wind tunnels and write [inaudible] and generate a lot of data and analyze the data and turn it over to the mission planners. They'd go do the mission planning while I'd go run another test. So I want to take you back in time a little bit to 1969 and try to imagine being tasked to do that what I just said to define the aero dynamics, the aero thermodynamics and the vehicle dynamics of an undefined, but what turned out to be a five different configuration vehicle for entry and to land on Mars which we didn't know, as John has said over and over, what the atmosphere really was. We started out the program, we had five different models of what the atmosphere could be and before we launched we had narrowed it down to three models of what the atmosphere could have been. Now on top of that, consider the fact that you have these constraints and this list could be a lot longer and I just decided not to be too boring. We had going into the program we were the first ones, so there was no flight heritage that we could rely on to say how to do the job we had to do. The second, there were no smart phones, there were no laptops, there were no desktop computers, there was no CFD for you guys who are now doing this work, there was no PowerPoint, there were no conference etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So you can put anything on that list that you want that wasn't in existence in 1969 that is in existence today to help you do your job. But what we did have was and this is kind of tongue-in-cheek a central computing system, a building up the road here, to which after you wrote your program and punched all your little cards and put them in a box, you carried them to the central computing system, you put them in the queue and then you go back to your office and they call you when your run was over. And that might take an hour, a day, a week you never knew. You also had a secretary that knew how to type and you had an illustrator to help you make view graphs. So there was no, you know, that was all manual work. But most importantly, we had access to the expertise of the engineers and researchers at Langley. We had access-- we had a priority access to all the facilities that's what Cortright did for us, had access to the research facilities at Langley Research Center. And we had access to other NASA facilities and non-NASA facilities. So in my position I could go anywhere within NASA, particularly at Langley and say I want to run a test at your facility and the door was open and that was the way the program worked. And we had access-- when John brought up the Voyager program, there was at least 10 years of studies that were done technically on the Voyager for the Voyager program, we had access to all that data and that data included definition of potential entry vehicles, the aero thermal and the candidates that we had at the time were 120 degree cone, 60 degree half angle or 140 degree cone, a tension shell and there were other configurations that we considered early in the program that might be candidates for the [inaudible] system. And then the accelerator system, the parachute. There were flight tests on things like a cross shoot, a ring sail, diskette band, pilot chutes, [inaudible] and [inaudible], supersonic [inaudible]. So all these things were part of the Viking shopping list when we started the program as to things we could potentially do. Oh we also had access to the Navier-Stokes equations with many of the terms exed out because we didn't know the answer and Newton's law. That was all tongue-in-cheek too. So given all of that, the first thing we had to do was to define and then accomplish a comprehensive ground test and analysis program to solve these problems. There was a great emphasis on the ground testing because of the status of analytics that existed in 1969. Before this task was over, put it up, it included results from 23 test facilities at eight locations. This is what I spent my life doing. These are the facilities that Viking tested in across the country, AADC, we'll talk about some of these a little bit more later, Cornell, [inaudible] Lab, Colorado State University, KSC, AADC and all these facilities and Langley and I'm not sure how many of them are still left. But they were invaluable to us solving the problems we had to solve back then. This program proceeded great without any glitches, it was a very smoothly run program, just kept us very busy, a lot of data until this happens. And what you see here is a 10 percent scale model of the diskette band parachute that were planning to fly the orbiter with, I mean the lander with and it's full of holes. This happened at AADC, one of the first trips I took down there and that was the worst day of my life to have to call Langley and tell them that the parachute failed in the wind tunnel. I could talk on this for hours, but I don't have an hour. So this problem was mentioned earlier about the top 10 list, it sat on the top of the top 10 list for a long time and the solution became a small project in its own. But it was solved by just taking this parachute and moving it back in the wake where after the wake turbulence from the fore body as it entered, recovered the drag and eliminated the turbulence that [inaudible]. So after we solved this problem we had all the data, basically the data we needed to produce the aero dynamics data book, the aero physics data book, vehicle dynamics data book. This all took place in a period of three and a half years. So it was a busy time. And we also supported the, BLDT configuration as it evolved. And let's see what else okay, where are we going here. And as a result of all these tests and analysis of the data, the shopping list was whittled down to where the baseline configuration was defined to be the 140 degrees, 70 degree half angle cone, 3 1/2 meters in diameter. It initially started out as a ballistic entry vehicle, but over time the vehicle got a little heavier and heavier, so we offset the CG and it became the lifting body. We had a single stage to mortar deployed DGB and the parachute was located at the trailing distance of 88.54 fore bodies behind the entry vehicle and the propulsion system John showed you [inaudible]. And the technologies that I guess John would like me to speak about is the parachute. The data books that we generated are still being used by and have been used by every program that has gone to Mars and entered the Martian atmosphere. It's the foundation, it's the heritage that we didn't have when we started Viking. And what I didn't speak about was the heatshield material was SLA561 with a V after it because it was developed specifically for Viking and has been then the TPS for every one of the entry vehicles except the latest MSL which decided they didn't like it anymore. But we go into that one and talk about it a long time too. So SLA561V has been the basis for every entry vehicle, the diskette band parachute has been the basis, and the 140 degree cone configuration has been the basis for all the Martian entry vehicles we've known. So I guess I'm going to say something a little bit and my only regret, my one regret is that after Viking Langley decided not to do anymore flight projects like Viking because it diluting the ability to do basic research and I think personally that the research results that came out of the support for Viking accomplished an awful lot and didn't get the credit it deserved here at Langley. So thank you. [ Applause ] >> Now we've been waiting to hear the science results because as Gus reminded us, the science was the reason for going and we've got the perfect guy to do that with Joel Levine. Joel spent 41 years here at Langley as a senior scientist, he was the Mars scout program scientist for the Mars exploration program at NASA headquarters, he co-chairs NASA's human exploration of Mars science analysis group. He studied the Viking results and is going to talk about the new picture of Mars from Viking. He currently is a professor at William and Mary, so here's Joel. >> Thank you John. [ Applause ] When John and Gus said, Viking was a science driven mission, they were right. Because the three engineers were given five minutes and no view graphs, I was given 10 minutes and eight view graphs [laughter]. So if we can have the first one. Let me say first of all that what Viking accomplished has never been accomplished by any NASA project. Four operating spacecraft around Mars at the same time lasting years and each landers with 13 instruments and the orbiters with four. And I just want to summarize the Viking results. I'll also say that about a year and a half ago I advised a PhD student at Brown University, she got her PhD studying Viking data from 1976, so each year about a half a dozen to a dozen dissertations are given with Viking data. Okay Viking obtained the first in situ within the atmosphere measurements of the vertical distribution of atmospheric density, pressure and temperature. We never had that before. Viking made the first in situ measurements of the chemical composition of the atmosphere of Mars. We never had that before. Viking discovered the presence of nitrogen in the atmosphere of Mars. Nitrogen after water, nitrogen is a key ingredient for life and Viking showed that the atmosphere of Mars has nitrogen, which we didn't know before, it's not detectable spectroscopically. The Viking nitrogen measurements were very interesting because the mass spectrometer, the entry mass spectrometer had the capability, it was such a good instrument it could measure isotopic ratio of atoms and it measured the isotopic ratio of nitrogen 14 to 15. Because 15 nitrogen is 15 is one atomic mass or one [inaudible] higher than 14. For the first time we could study by looking at the isotopic data, we could study the history of the atmosphere of Mars and the Viking data showed us that Mars probably lost at least 99.99 percent of its atmosphere over geological time. One of the most interesting, oh and if Mars lost 99.99 percent, we understand the features that Norm Crabill showed of flowing water on Mars because Mars' atmosphere is too thin to support water on the surface, but if the atmosphere were considerably thicker in the past it would explain what we're seeing and we now believe that at one point Mars was covered with lakes, rivers, and in fact the northern hemisphere or the bulk of the northern hemisphere was an early ocean that was probably 3 miles deep. That was reported about three months ago. One of the most interesting measurements that Viking made with the GCMS was no organics detected on the surface, we did not detect organic material on the surface of Mars, which was not very good if you're looking for life. We now believe that the reason there are no organics on the surface is that the surface of Mars is very highly oxidizing, very unique surface in the solar system and the surface, highly oxidized surface because hydrogen peroxide and ozone impact the surface making the surface very highly chemically reactive and that explains why there were no organics. So the discovery of the highly chemical, chemically reactive nature of the surface was a major discovery. Next. Now what Viking measured, not only carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon, but it measured the isotopes of each of these things and also neon, krypton and xenon and what's interesting on the y-axis the Mars atmosphere as Viking observed in 1976 on the entry mass spectrometer. On the x-axis are the chemical analysis of air bubbles in Mars meteorites, there are about two dozen meteorites we found on earth mostly in the Antarctic and Arctic and when you analyze those bubbles and it's plotted on the same curve as Viking that's how we know they came from Mars. This is a major discovery and a major advancement in our understanding of the isotopic ratio of gases. Next. Viking showed that the surface pressure of Mars varies during the year by 30 percent. In other words, the atmosphere at any given location varies from 30 percent over the year and that's because carbon dioxide condenses at the pole that's having winter and that's a very unusual event. You know, the atmosphere of Earth varies by a few millibars from day to day, but on Mars, it over 30 percent variation. We're looking at the-- the top chart is actually Lander-1 even though it says Lander-2 and you can see the variability of pressure at the two light Viking landing sites. Fantastic variation in density due to condensation of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is 95 percent of the atmosphere. Next. Now what we didn't discuss in any detail is one of the reasons we want to go to Mars, one of the reasons we go to the rest of the solar system is to answer the question, is Earth the only object in the solar system with life. And in the history of space exploration Viking is the only mission that attempted to answer that question. Now we ask a question could life have existed on Mars. We talk about global habitability, but we don't talk about life detection anymore. Viking is the only mission ever launched anywhere in the solar system to have a life detection experiment. There were by the time Viking was launched there were three life detection experiments, pyrolytic release, labeled release and gas exchange. And basically the idea of these three experiments is to bring in some material from outside Mars, some Mars soil and to incubate it with nutrient and see if we could detect metabolic activity. And the results are very interesting. Next. Okay this is from the final results of the Viking biology experiments. This is from the September 30th, 1977, issue of Journal Geophysical Research which was 1,500 pages of Viking results, 1500 pages of Viking scientific results. The pyrolytic release experiment, the results were a biological interpretation of the results is unlikely. Let me skip down to the gas exchange experiment, all the exchanges observed can most easily be explained or demonstrated by plausible chemical reactions that require no biological processes. But let's look at the labeled release, number two. As of this writing, and this was published in a peer-review journal September 30th, 1977, the labeled release results are entirely consistent with a possible biological interpretation. In other words, prior to the launch of Viking the biologists got together and said, well what would constitute a positive result meaning Viking detected life and Gil Levin who designed this concluded that his results are consistent with the biological explanation. Next. Jerry Soffen, the project scientist who himself was a biologist, concluded the biology experiments of Viking, were by far the most complex of all investigations. There was no unambiguous discovery of life by the Viking landers and all three results appear to indicate the absence of biology in the samples tested, appear to indicate. Nevertheless, the experiment gave significant results revealing the chemical nature of the Martian surface and at least one result that could still be consistent with biological interpretation is the labeled release. One experiment indicates that the Martian soil has an agent capable of rapidly decomposing organic chemicals used in the medium or that life is present, okay so that was 1977. Next. The principal investigator of labeled release continued working for years and years and is in fact still working, he's now on the faculty at Arizona State Gil Levin. And he published a major article in 1977 and what he did is he analyzed all of the data over again labeled release and is now even more certain that life was discovered by Viking in 1976. About two years ago, an independent group at the University of California, San Francisco microbiologist took all the Viking labeled release data, analyzed them, and concluded that the data is most consistent with the biological rather than a chemical explanation. Next. And when that paper came out in a peer review journal came out in 2012, at a press release, this is from National Geographic which is the first one I found, life on Mars found by NASA's Viking mission? New analysis suggests robots discovered microbes in 1976. So in addition to the 55,000 pictures of the surface of Mars taken from orbit. In addition to the 5,500 pictures of the Mars surface, in addition to the first measurements of the atmosphere, composition, pressure, density, in addition to the discovery that the surface of Mars is unlike any other surface in the solar system, it just may be that in 1976, the people sitting in this room actually discovered the presence of life on the surface of Mars. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> All right, now let's bring all these gentlemen up quickly over here and open it up for questions and [inaudible]. >> And that's a very good question, the question was why haven't we looked for life on anything since Viking and it's ironic that in the new issue of Space News which is available in the library, a lot of you get it. The new issue of Space News Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at Ames Research Center asks that question during his interview, he said the goal of exploration of planets is to study-- is to search for life. To answer the question are we alone on this life unique to this planet and he says, since Viking there has been no attempt to search for life and that's a very good question. I personally served on the review board that picked the instruments for Mars 2020 Rover, that's a carbon copy of Mars Science Lab and I was given the task of reviewing the life detection experiments. And there were a number of experiments that consisted of chips that could detect the presence of about 250 organic molecules. It's been tested on earth and in desert. We know a lot of information, it's called lab on a chip and I was shocked when the announcement came out on what instruments were selected because none of these life detection experiments which were probably two orders of magnitude more precise than what Viking did, not one was selected and you ask me why is that and the answer is I don't know. >> John, I got a question for Joel [laughter]. >> Can we have the panel members ask other panel members questions? >> I think we're able to do that [laughter]. >> Did you put up the [inaudible] slide that showed the pressure measurements, can you do that? >> I think so. >> On Lander-1 there was a blip, a step function, meteor impact or what? Do you remember seeing that in there? >> No, I don't remember seeing that. But these were in general averaged over some time period. >> You can see it there. >> Okay. >> The third one. >> Yeah the third one. [ Inaudible Comment ] >> There's a step function there just before 335. On the top curve. >> The blue one. >> Oh okay these are [inaudible] in two different years, they're two different years. >> But there's a step function in time. >> Yeah. >> Where the blue line [inaudible]. >> Yeah, yeah no I see. Maybe it's. >> No explanation? >> No, maybe it, no explanation. It's maybe [inaudible]. >> [inaudible] years. >> Yeah that's true. Maybe it was a calibration problem. >> Okay. >> John and [inaudible] thank you, [inaudible] question, 40 years ago, actually 39 years ago after you'd been on the surface for some time, how long did you think it would be before we actually humans to Mars? >> Well I'll take a shot at it. I would say that I thought we be doing it yesterday. No, it's just-- it's pathetic for what's happened because the Mars exploration program continues with repeatable work rather than interesting steps and I think it's because we don't have the courage to send humans with what we know about the environment and the problems connected with survival. And the public wouldn't take sending people on a one-way ticket at this time and that's just my personal feeling. If somebody else feels differently. >> I'd like to make a comment. I want to read what happened, not really it's a book written called the Martian about a guy that got left on Mars [laughter]. He got back all right. >> Did you want to say anything about [laughter]? >> I think the-- I don't think there were any real technological problems that have to be overcome to send humans to Mars and return them safely and the I think to a large extent the explanation is budget that it costs a lot of money and the Congress is not willing to increase the budget of NASA even the few percent to achieve this important goal. I mean Congress can't agree on anything, so why would we expect them to agree to send humans to Mars. I think given an increase in budget, we could do it by 2025 and I think it's a budgetary problem not a science or technology problem. >> Let me have that a minute [laughter]. >> We have a question. >> I was just wondering how big [inaudible] the heatshield [inaudible] landing a human on Mars? >> That's your problem. >> I haven't studied that. Mark, Mar. Well the Viking was 3.5 meters, I can't extrapolate for you I've been doing something else for a long time [laughter]. >> Neil Cheatwood what's your answer, how big? >> Is Neil back there? >> Yeah Neil's back there. >> Fifteen to 20 meters [inaudible]. >> Say that again. >> Fifteen to 20 meters [inaudible] inflatable [laughter]. >> Okay that's your answer. >> Let me have it. >> Yeah. >> Okay I got one for you Walt. You want to send people to Mars you want to get there faster and come back faster and a guy named Diaz is working on ion propulsions and he claims 39 days. I had an intern do a study for me a couple summers ago to accelerate a 1G halfway and flip and decelerated 1G you can get there in 10 days. >> The [inaudible] with that is you got to slow down the [inaudible] so you don't burn up when you hit the atmosphere right. >> No, no you. >> Decelerate the [inaudible]. >> Decelerate. >> Do you decelerate the whole way down? >> No, you accelerate and flip it and decelerate, so you got 1G all the time. >> Got it. [ Inaudible Comment ] >> Is there any data to indicate whether the loss of atmosphere in water was catastrophic [inaudible]? >> Global warming. >> The general consensus is that Mars lost 99.99 percent of its atmosphere once Mars lost its planetary scale magnetic field because the global planetary magnetic field protects Mars from direct impact of solar wind, high energy particulate radiation, protons and helium ions that come off the sun. And without a magnetic field there's a sandblasting effect and that sandblasting effect in several hundred million years would cause the loss of 99.99 percent of the atmosphere. So that's-- when that happened we don't know, but that's the best idea as to why Mars doesn't have an atmosphere. Once the atmosphere was gone, water couldn't exist under such low pressure so the warder sublimated and once in the atmosphere as a gas water vapor it was broken down by solar ultraviolet radiation. >> What were your feelings [inaudible] a timeline from when you started entry and descent and landing down through say when you [inaudible]? >> Hold your breath. >> That was going to be, that was going to be my answer, it was a hold your breath the whole time and it was even worse for Lander-2 because Lander-2 was supposed to-- we of course had the timelines and Lander-2 was supposed to arrive on Mars at a given time and the key that would tell us that Lander-2 had actually landed safely was the first thing you'd see was a bit rate change. So we were all sitting there watching the computer or the console for the bit rate change and when the time came no change, 30 seconds, 45 seconds no change. A minute after we got the change. You could hear everybody doing that when that happened because obviously absolutely there was no breathing during that one minute I can assure you. >> I'd like to have one more shot at the human exploration of Mars and that I do believe some positive things have taken place along with some of the negative things that I mentioned and others have mentioned and that is current experiment done by the twins, the two astronauts one on earth and one on the space station, to determine what a one year separation. See the big concern is really not the physical, but the metal. Being away from-- you can't trade somebody for 30 or 40 years, give them a little bit of training and change their life to such an extent that the communications change, what you do living in a capsule or in a confined environment. What happens to you after one year in space is going to be very instrumental in deciding whether we go or not because I still think humans are not expendable and we'll keep treating it that way. In addition to the budget problems and the science problems, I think the problem is are we ready to send people where with the hope that they would come back. You know, you can't make the John F. Kennedy speech that said, we'll return them safely to earth. That's the question I think before the [inaudible]. Anybody disagrees with that they could talk about it. >> Hang on, oh I've got one, have we licked the radiation shielding problem to take these people to Mars and back? >> Well I think we have, I just don't think they have a good feeling for what the long range effect is and then even the very simple things that took place over this past year of the recent [inaudible], there's more thinking now that you're going to have to be self-generating, you're going to have to be able to grow your own substance to survive rather than depend on a Russian spacecraft [inaudible], you know. And so the logistical problem of keeping them alive all has to be thought out, along with the ability for humans to adapt to that kind of existence. >> [Inaudible] we've heard in a few places today about the management and leadership of the program and how it contributed to its success. So I'm wondering your thoughts on lessons learned and sort of key aspects of that that you think would be important to apply to any engineering process and in particular, looking at getting humans to Mars. >> John, if you could call up my last chart, I happen to put that on a chart I didn't show you. But that's only one person's. [ Inaudible Comment ] Opinion of it's not only Viking, but my 60 years in this business so. >> Your [inaudible] last chart? >> Yeah it's lessons learned. Go to the one before that, it's two pages John. >> Okay, all right. >> Okay this is as a pseudo leader, what I would pass on to future leaders is to consider this as you run any endeavor that brings resources and technology together and we lost it [laughter]. [ Inaudible Comment ] >> [Inaudible] I couldn't find the [inaudible]. Okay [inaudible]. >> Okay. On an airplane trip maybe 10 or 15 years ago I sat down and said I would write 10 things about my lessons learned experience and I said you know what I better make 9, 10 is kind of a religious [inaudible]. So I limited it to nine. Never lose your capacity for enthusiasm. If you don't like what you're doing, if science isn't important to you, if engineering isn't and you're just doing a project because you got to take home some bread, don't do it. That's the first thing. Never lose your capacity for indignation. There are days that you come that you really got to stand up and say, you know what I don't like what's going on and we're going to do something about it and you got to be strong enough to do it. I'll tell you just one story of that in my career. I was deputy at Ames research Center and we had Carl Sagan under contract to do some research on the post Viking data coming from, not Langley but Ames to support graduate students and that type of thing and he wasn't delivering because he was busy doing the Cosmo series. And I had to have the courage to get on the phone and tell him we didn't like it, we were going to close down his contract. And before you know it the data start coming in and we start getting it all done. So you have to have the strength to not get intimidated by position. You just got to do that thing. Never judge classified people too quickly. First assume that she or he, notice I put she first I've [inaudible] a lot [laughter]. That she or he is good. Always think the best of everybody and that you have the responsibility to put the square peg in the square hole. They didn't come with a deficiency because you created it and you need to fix it. Never be impressed with wealth or thrown by poverty. Both of those have evils in them and to make sure that you don't treat somebody differently because they could support you and you don't take advantage of people who are in need and that's a lesson in life that you need to carry out. If you can't be generous when it's hard to be, you will not be when it's easy. And just go to bed that night thinking about that. And the greatest builder of confidence is the ability to do something almost anything well. Another Ames story, I like to tell Ames story because everything at Langley is perfect [laughter]. >> Was. >> I had the [laughter], I had the opportunity to be acting director for almost three months and during that time period the 40 x 80 x 120 wind tunnel blew up. >> Right. >> And it's my fault and I got to be able to accept that and I didn't know what to do with myself, so I went home and wallpapered the smallest bathroom we had. Because when I got done with it, it builds up your confidence, do almost anything you can get your hands on to feel good about it, it doesn't the solve wind tunnel blowing up, but it puts you back in motion of gaining the confidence to be a leader again and just remember that. Can I have the next one John? >> I'm hoping you can. >> Okay and when the confidence comes, then strive for humility because you're not that damn good [laughter]. And the way to become truly useful is to seek the best that other brains have to offer and use them to supplement your own and be prepared to give them credit and let the world know that they helped. That's a key thing that was true on Viking, it was true on everything I've ever touched and the fact that no matter what it is you can't do it all yourself and do your best to find the people that can do it and reward them adequately when you do it. And lastly, the greatest tragedy in work and personal events stem from a misunderstanding, the answer is communicate. Follow these rules and I would say that you'd have another successful Viking. Thank you [applause]. >> You need to talk to a different audience about that. >> [Inaudible] know I'd have the chart for that question. >> I think we're about to close now, so I want to thank you and Joel and Gus and Paul and Norm and all the other Vikings that are here today. I will say since we have so many of you here today we'd like to get a picture outside if you want to step out and we'll just do it right on the front steps there, I think that would be great. We'd really be honored if you would allow us to do that. I just want to say to somebody who had the opportunity and the privilege to work on one of the follow-on Mars programs, Mars Pathfinder, and I know we've got a lot of people here in the audience at Langley who have worked on subsequent Mars missions that we truly stood on the shoulders of the Viking Giants and we thank you for that. >> Thank you. [ Inaudible Comment ] [ Applause ] >> I just want to put in one pitch here for Rachel Tilman and her website is the Mars Viking Preservation Project and she is collecting artifacts, information, she has spoken to a lot of the Vikings here and she's going-- and this eventually is going to move into museums all across the country with displays and so when you hear about Mars Preservation Project think about that, help her and go to her website. I do want to just put in that plug because she is truly helping us carry the memory of Viking further. Thank you [applause].

Channel: NASA Langley Research Center

Views: 20,952

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: NASA, Langley Research Center, Mars, Viking, Viking 1, Viking 2, Mars landing, Viking Program (Project)

Id: L37Qw3tlw7g

Length: 113min 54sec (6834 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 03 2015