Oh golly! With apologies to the late great Carl Sagan, that’s a nice photo-montage, thank you! The image was taken as a publicity photo for the original Cosmos television series broadcast on the American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1980. Carl and crew received permission from Martin Marietta (maker of the lander) and NASA to bring the Proof Test Capsule (PTC) test lander to Death Valley for filming parts of Cosmos episode 5, “Blues for a Red Planet” which prominently featured the Viking '75 missions. The PTC lander has been on exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM) since about 1981 (the link contains detailed photography from one of my NASM research trips, in 2016; many thanks to the NASM staff for granting me permission to conduct the photography survey).
Here is an un-doctored photo of me and another Viking test lander, this one taken during my first visit to the California Science Center in 2013 to collect measurements and detail photography of the unit. (The preceding albums contain the results of two research trips to the CSC, one in 2013 and one in 2017. My thanks to the staff at the CSC for granting permission.)
Really remarkable video Tom. I’m always so impressed with the detail and fidelity of your modelling, and the effort it represents.
This video — with the engineering principles and approaches that it covers — would be an excellent basis for a semester-long introductory aerospace engineering course. The clarity of the animations and their voice-over explanations renders the very complex design totally comprehensible.
Thank you, @db11 for the kind words. I had fun (mostly, plus some frustration!) while learning to create Ruby scripts in SketchUp to generate the tricky animations (involving either carefully synchronized movement, or deformation of geometry). The short ray-casting animation of parabolic focusing (at about 9:00 into the video) was especially fun, because decades ago I had written a fairly sophisticated ray-tracing renderer and it reminded me of those days.
photo of me and another Viking test lander, this one taken during my first visit to the California Science Center in 2013 to collect measurements and detail photography of the unit. (The preceding albums contain the results of two research trips to the CSC, one in 2013 and one in 2017. My thanks to the staff at the CSC for granting permission.)
