NEED: Viking lander arm tech details

Glen Overby wrote:


and the picture Jim wants is:
http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/ceps...VL_sampler.gif



That's a really nice shot, isn't it?

Pat

Gene Cash wrote:


Another exhibit was a LM inside the VAB. You walked in, and there was
this *tiny* four-legged spacecraft in the middle of this *enormous*
expanse of floor. It looked like a toy. You walked and walked, and
eventually you got to a LM mockup that you could crawl around inside.




A friend of mine saw a Soviet LK manned lunar lander at NASM and it was so small that he thought it was unmanned.

Pat

Actually the sample scoop at the end of the arm had a strainer cup
built at the top.
After the sample was scooped up, the arm retracted and the scoop
rotated 180 degrees to deposit he sample throught the strainer to the
head of each of three experiments. A good movie of this can be seen in
one of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" episodes.

I have a hard copy of the Viking News Reference, too bad it is not
available as a PDF file.

Matthew Ota

Pat Flannery wrote:
Gary W. Swearingen wrote:

One of the things I haven't forgotten seeing in a museum
(Smithsonian?) 20 years ago was that ingenious-looking tube-ish beam
that rolls out of a small canister. It belongs in some Clever Gadget
Hall of Fame, right after the folding wing joint on some WWII Navy
planes which seems to fold in two ways with only one hinge line.


The Grumman system. They came up with that by sticking a bent paper clip
into a rubber eraser.
What was really clever about the Viking tube system was that the sample
traveled up the hollow interior of the arm.

Pat

Matthew Ota wrote:

After the sample was scooped up, the arm retracted and the scoop
rotated 180 degrees to deposit he sample throught the strainer to the
head of each of three experiments. A good movie of this can be seen in
one of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" episodes.




My bad. :-[

Pat

Wow -- and that's why newsgroups trump search engines every day!
Thanks!


"Pat Flannery" wrote
super stuff

Have we heard from him lately, to thanks him?

"Pat Flannery" wrote
I only found the PDF by doing a Google "group" search under "NASA Viking
PDF Rusty" knowing that if such a thing existed, Rusty would have found it
at one point or another.
This was the guy who found the dread spacesuit vomit tube PDF. :-D

Jim Oberg wrote:

Wow -- and that's why newsgroups trump search engines every day!
Thanks!


"Pat Flannery" wrote
super stuff



That was a very fluky piece of luck, particularly opening the book up to
the correct page- in case you want to cite the book as a reference
source, it's:
"The Search For Life On Mars-Evolution Of An Idea" by Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.
Pub. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston - Owl Book Edition
1981
ISBN 0-03-046166-9
The book is based on material that first appeared in The New Yorker.
I should have spotted my mistake regarding the sample going up the
interior of the arm, as the book describes how the arm retracts to dump
the sample into one of the multiple hopper openings for analyses
To be able to get the arm to unroll like that once is impressive; to get
it to be able to retract and extend multiple times is downright amazing.

Pat

Jim Oberg wrote:

Have we heard from him lately, to thanks him?




He posted just yesterday on the "Aurora 7 TV" thread.
Wait a second..."to thanks him?"
You're not James Oberg...your name is Smeagol, isn't it?
Well, your not getting Mr.Barton's ring! :-)

Pat

"Jim Oberg" writes:

Yeah, but what was the metal that the tube was made of?
I can't find that, yet...

I can only speculate:

I'll guess it was nickel spring steel, which according to my quick
research is non-magnetic and non-rusting and better at low temp than
stainless steel. My distinct (but possibly wrong) memory of the
surface is of a satin-finish (powder-coated?) fairly dark gray.
That's rather contradicted by
http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/ceps...viking_MOF.gif
where it looks blacker -- almost looks like the X-15 surface, whatever
that is. But then the shiny legs, etc, look very dark too and the
white looks gray.

Gary W. Swearingen wrote:

almost looks like the X-15 surface, whatever
that is.



X-15 was Inconel-X, a nickel alloy.

Pat