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On Mars:
Exploration of the Red Planet. 1958-1978
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- Viking Lander: Creating the
Science Teams
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- [203] Designing and fabricating the
Viking lander was a difficult task. Engineers at JPL could draw on
their experiences with Mariner systems as they worked on the
orbiter, but the lander team was tackling a new field. The men in
California completed the orbiter with relatively few technical
difficulties; but the contractors at Martin Marietta in Denver,
breaking much new technological ground, encountered many problems.
The lander was far more complex than NASA's previous unmanned
lander, the lunar Surveyor, and Viking's goals were more
ambitious. Viking was twice as heavy as Surveyor; it had two
cameras for stereophotography and a complement of very
sophisticated scientific instruments, and it was destined to land
on a planet far more distant than Earth's own moon. The Viking
lander represented a series of clever inventions in answer to
specific problems. While this inventiveness can be seen clearly in
the creation and fabrication of the biology instrument and the gas
chromatograph-mass spectrometer, the NASA-contractor team also
developed a host of other new solutions to meet new technological
demands.
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- As with the orbiter, the first priorities
of the Viking managers in dealing with the lander were
establishing spacecraft specifications, selecting an organization
to build it, and forming key teams to do the work- industrial,
managerial. and scientific teams. Team-building began months
before the official approval of the Viking program when Jim Martin
at Langley Research Center selected some of his top people from
the Lunar Orbiter team. For deputy project manager Martin selected
Israel Taback, spacecraft manager for Lunar Orbiter. Iz, as he was
called by his colleagues, had joined the Langley staff in 1942 as
a mechanical engineer on graduation from Cooper Union Engineering
School. He successively headed the Instrument calibration
laboratory-a group developing aircraft flight instruments-and the
navigation and communications branch at the Langley center. Gerald
A. Soffen, Viking project scientist, once noted that while Taback
might have looked like a tailor among the engineers and managers,
he was the wizard behind the Viking lander. If any one man could
be awarded the title "father of the lander," it was Taback.
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- [204] During the summer and fall of
1968. Taback supervised the progress of the contractors studying
various technological approaches for landing on Mars. General
Electric was investigating hard-landers; McDonnell Douglas
Astronautics was examining soft-landers; the Boeing Company was
studying propulsion and landing systems; and Hughes Aircraft was
looking into low-cost landers, support modules, and mission
reliability. In Denver, the Martin Marietta Corporation was
winding up a study of direct versus out-of-orbit entry for the
lander. 2 These early studies helped define the shape and
size a Mars lander would have for a Titan-launched mission. They
also drew attention to subjects that would require special
handling. Taback and his associates at Langley worked constantly
with the contractors so that their latest ideas for alternative
approaches to lander design could be debated and evaluated in NASA
circles.
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worked on general approaches to lander design, Jim Martin took
steps to begin definition of the science payload. In August 1968,
he established a science instrument working group under the
chairmanship of G. Calvin Broome. Broome, who had joined Langley
in June 1962, was manager of the photographic subsystem of Lunar
Orbiter, overseeing design, fabrication, testing, and operation of
the instrument that would photograph the lunar surface. Just 30
years old in the summer of 1968, Cal Broome was given a major
responsibility for Viking. His working group, a subdivision of the
Mission Design Steering Committee, would oversee all the
preliminary planning for the scientific payloads for the orbiter
and lander. Essential to its work was an understanding of the
interactions among the various lander experiments, especially the
interfaces among the surface sampler, biological instrument, and
gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer experiments being proposed for
the mission. 3
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- With the definition of the lander and
science hardware taking shape, Jim Martin needed a project
scientist. He first took measure of Gerald Soffen during a 1967
briefing, when Soffen, a senior scientist at JPL, described his
abbreviated microscope as a possible life detector. The scientist
impressed Martin with his technical competence and his enthusiasm
for Mars exploration. Jerry Soffen, 42 years old in 1968, was one
of the early members of the exobiology community. After receiving
his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1960, he had been a U.S.
Public Health Service fellow at the New York University School of
Medicine. Shortly after he joined the JPL staff, he took part in
devising instruments for detecting life on Mars, in the science
planning for Mariner B, and in the development of automated
biology laboratories. Before the demise of Voyager, Soffen had
been deputy project scientist for that endeavor. With this
background, he had the necessary stature in the scientific
community that Martin was sure would be needed by the project
scientist of a 1973 Mars landing mission. 4
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- In August 1968, Edgar M. Cortright,
Langley director, asked JPL Director William H. Pickering to
assign five JPL staff members to the [205] Virginia center
for six to nine months of temporary duty. Of those requested, four
had taken part in capsule systems advanced development activities
at JPL. The fifth was Soffen. Pickering and his managers were
unhappy about this request. At that time, Langley and JPL were
competing over Mars mission proposals, and did not seem to be in
JPL's best interests to send its specialists to help the
competition. Pickering told Cortright that if Langley wanted
Soffen, then Soffen would have to resign his position and join the
civil service staff at Langley. Soffen recalled that he felt like
a pawn in a game of planetary chess. Cortright could not promise
that the Langley proposal for a 1973 Mars mission would be
approved, and if it were not, Soffen could find himself a solitary
scientist awash in a sea of engineers in Tidewater Virginia. If he
stayed at JPL, he would be able to keep alive his vital contacts
with other space scientists, but he might also miss the
opportunity to lead the first landed scientific investigations of
Mars. Cortright ultimately persuaded Pickering to agree to
Soffen's temporary assignment to the Langley Mars 73 planning
project, but only after an appeal to John Naugle at NASA
Headquarters. 5
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- Reflecting on his decision to move from
California, Soffen commented that morale and leadership also
affected his desire to make the change. In the months immediately
following the termination of Voyager, the planners at JPL were in
turmoil. At Langley, the situation was different. Cortright and
Martin wanted their 1973 project to become a reality, and Martin
especially pursued this goal with single-minded zeal. If sheer
will and determination could make something happen, then Langley
would be the center that landed spacecraft on Mars. Appreciating
this aggressive spirit, Soffen forced the issue of his being
detailed to Langley by purchasing a house in Hampton, Virginia. In
the face of a determined Soffen and a solid front in the NASA
management, Pickering had to let Soffen go east.
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