She inherited NASA’s spare Viking Mars lander. Now, she wants to find it a permanent home.
Rachel Tillman grew up surrounded by Mars science, courtesy of her late father. A member of the meteorological science team for NASA’s twin Viking spacecraft, James Tillman brought his daughter to Florida for the August 1975 launch of Viking 1, and to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California nearly a year later when the lander returned the first images from the red planet’s surface. Now, Tillman wants to make her own contribution to Viking’s legacy, by preserving the artifacts and documents related to NASA’s first Mars landings.
On April 15, she began an “open-ended” tour of the U.S. with various pieces of Viking hardware that she and her father collected over the years for their nonprofit, the Viking Mars Missions Education and Preservation Project. Tillman plans to crisscross the country, visiting schools, planetariums, libraries and conferences to give presentations. She has events scheduled through early May but told me that she will keep traveling as long as there is interest.
“It will end when it ends,” she says. “It’s more about covering ground than it is about the timing.”
She says she is not charging for these talks, but any donations she receives will be put toward finding a permanent home for the collection, which amounts to some 600 square meters of original mission documents and materials. Her ultimate goal is to establish a working museum and archive where students, engineers and the public can visit to learn the written, oral and technical history of the $1.06 billion mission.
Over the years, various pieces have been loaned to museums around the U.S. for temporary display. But in the long-term, Tillman believes that a privately funded facility would be the best permanent home for the collection. This would ensure that it stays available to the public, she says, whereas a larger institution with a wider range of items on display might experience shifts in focus or funding.
The collection began in 1979, when James Tillman stumbled across some of his own Viking science instruments for sale on the U.S. General Services Administration surplus list. He purchased them, but initially balked at also buying what would become the centerpiece: “Flight lander body #3,” partially constructed by NASA as a backup in case there was a mission-ending failure with Viking 1 or 2. No such issues arose, so this spare was never completed and later put up for sale.
“He told me about it, and I was like, ‘Dad, I want that,’” Tillman says. “He said, ‘That’s ridiculous, it’s too big for our house.’ And I said, ‘No, we’ll put it in my school and we’ll teach kids about robotics and science and Mars.’”
Her father convinced, they acquired the lander. After the school, it went on to be displayed in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Museum of Flight in Seattle and the University of Washington, where James Tillman was a professor. Over the years, he also took smaller pieces of hardware to schools for educational talks about Mars science.
“He basically did what I’m doing before I did it,” Tillman says, referring to her tour, “so I’m really following in my dad’s footsteps.”
In the 2000s, Tillman started conducting her own oral history interviews with members of the Viking team, collecting original documents, blueprints, computer programming and magnetic data tapes. These materials not only describe the final specifications of the Viking spacecraft but also the many design iterations.
In Tillman’s view, it all adds up to a rich archive that could potentially save future engineers and mission designers time and money. “If you want to do descent engines for another Mars vehicle, if you don’t have the knowledge based on that original craft that worked successfully, then you’re going to have to spend twice as much money to go do the same testing that we did on Viking,” Tillman says.
The benefits of such an archive are well-known to NASA, whose engineers referred to similar documentation and hardware spares when developing the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis moon program, says Roger Launius, a former chief historian for the agency. For instance, rather than construct the spacecraft’s heat shield out of the reusable ceramic tiles used on the space shuttle orbiters, NASA decided on an ablative heat shield like those of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules.
“But by that time, 40 years had passed,” Launius says, and there were few people still around with working knowledge of that technology. So NASA went to the Smithsonian — where Launius was a senior curator at the time — which had in its collection small pieces of the 1960s and ’70s ablative heat shield test articles that the engineers could study.
“That’s a specific example where you would go back to a legacy project to find information that would help you do current things,” he says.
Tillman began her Viking tour with visits to two NASA field centers. She met with astrobiologists at Ames Research Center on April 17, then spoke with JPL staff on Wednesday afternoon. From there, the tour opens up to the public, with the following presentations confirmed:
- April 26 — Lomita Library, Lomita, California
- April 29 — Dale Etheridge Planetarium, Las Vegas
- May 1-4 — Biosphere 2 facility, Oracle, Arizona
When I spoke to her in mid-April, Tillman hoped to confirm additional dates in New Mexico, Texas and southeastern and northeastern states. She plans to keep an up-to-date schedule on her LinkedIn profile, and that’s also where people can submit a request for her to visit a specific community.
“They can look at our route and see where we are, and if we’re nearby, we’ll go,” she says.
Opener caption: The Viking 2 lander took this partial selfie on the surface of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Related Posts
