One with a pedigree of nasa and aerospace history, which is deep abroad and will have a fascinating discussion today. Let me start out, dr. Bilberry to my right is a current nasa chief historian from nasa from watching nbc roger,right is dr. Currently the associate director of collection and Territorial Affairs at the smithsonian institution. To his right is dr. Eric conway, the gpl historian and former langley historian. He spent time here before we sent them out to jpl. Current glenn, the history and nasa ames. Let me introduce you dr. Bill barry from headquarters will moderate our panel, and give us the beginnings of a great story. Thanks, bill. [applause] thanks, walt. Good afternoon, everybody. This is a great opportunity for us all to learn about viking and what happened 40 years ago. I imagine that 40 years ago today, on the 19th of july 1976, there was a lot of nailbiting and concern going on in the langley area and perhaps the other side of the coast out in california. For good reason. Getting to mars was really hard to do and we were attempting to lead a vehicle on mars. No one had done it before successfully. Not that people had not tried. At least there were six attempts to land on mars up to that point. None of them were completely successful. Mars 3 not a great success. Folks here were understandably nervous. The space age had been going on since 1957, almost 20 years. Getting to mars was harder. It was becoming more and more of the goal. Many of you may have been involved him or know more about it. It was an exciting time. We were reaching out to find new information to try and make a big leap in terms of understanding whether or not there was life on mars, and to learn more about the planet mars. It was a big, difficult step. Tomorrow, on the anniversary, there is going to be a symposium that will cover what we are doing in the future and how the policy connect to what we have done in the past. You will get an opportunity to met people involved in the program. Today, our objective is to get an historical background in the viking program and to think about some of the big pictures and big stories that you will find very interesting. Are nasa panelists historians. Before we get there, for those of you who were not there, i have a video that my friends put together about the 40th anniversary. It is about 4. 5 minutes long. Those of you who do not know about biking, will learn about it. Those of you who know, well see familiar faces. We will show it right now. [video clip] announcer in exploration, there are great moments of success and moments of setback. Lasting memories forever at etched in our combined experience that forges stronger resolve to reach new heights and explore the unknown. As we gaze off into the solar system, something in our humanity pushes us to move forward. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. Liftoff of the atlas v with curiosity. The puzzle about life on mars. Announcer nasa has been on the journey of exploration for more than half a century, a journey to mars. From mariner to phoenix and to maven and beyond, we have placed the marks of human ingenuity on and around the red planet. 40 years ago, nasas viking project found its place in history. July 20, 1976. Viking 1 was the first human probe to land on the surface, return images and data, and conduct science experiments on mars. Viking was a bold step for its time and a huge undertaking for nasa. Nasa employees, contractors, and industry across the country designed elements of this project. Viking consistent of two identical spacecraft with a payload of a lander and an orbiter each. Viking 1 and 2 were launched in august and september of 1975. Pair orbiter and lander flew together and entered the mars orbit, and it dissented to the planets surface for their planned 90 day missions. Viking 1 was originally targeted to land on july 4, 1976, our nations bicentennial, but images from the orbiter showed the planned landing site to be too rocky. After reconsidering the options, a new site was selected, and viking 1 touchdown on july 20, seven years to the day after the day after the apollo 11 crew touched down on the moon. The lander sent photographs and collected data on the martian surface. The Scientific Consensus from the viking experiments was that mars was self sterilizing due to the solar ultraviolet radiation, extreme dryness of the soil, and the oxidizing nature of the soil chemistry. This search for life on mars came up empty, but valuable data about mars, both from the surface and from the orbit, was gathered. The orbiter and lander duo outpaced their directions, operating for two to six years. The final transmission to earth on november 11, 1982. Today, our orbiters and rovers have changed the ways we look at mars and continue to make unprecedented scientific discoveries, while also answering longheld questions about mars and its relationship to earth, our solar system and beyond. We are working hard to develop the systems and technology humankind will one day used to live and work on the red planet and safely return home. If i have seen further, it is by standing up on this shoulders giants. The eventual first human footsteps on mars have as their steppingstones the vital robotic explorers that paved the way for our journey to mars. [end video clip] bill so a snapshot of viking, and there is so much more to tell about viking. We will hear about some of that tomorrow and details of that, but today, our three panelists are going to talk about the three aspects of expiration you will find fascinating. We will start with roger, venus, earth, mars comparative , climatology, to set the stage for mars and what the objective is there. All three of these are good friends of mine. Walter was the chief historian before me. The chief historian from nasa from 1999 until 2002. A nasa historian emeritus, and then our second speaker today will be erik conway, as you know, formerly the historian at langley before the folks at jpl took him away from you. And he will be talking about that nexus actually, the connection between viking, jpl, and langley and how that played out and how it went from pasadena to hampton, and then finally, we will close out the presentations today talking about the science experiments on viking. As you know, glenn is a historian out at ames. Hole through these german are great colleagues of mine and i know they will give you a presentation today. And so i will turn it over to roger to get started. [applause] figuring out which one is yours. Roger here we are. I met the smithsonian at the , national air and space museum, which i am certain is the Favorite Museum of anyone in this room. Am i correct . Notwithstanding the aerospace virginia air and space center, and i do have to start with a little bit of a plug. We have just reopened to our milestones of flight hall, the central hall in the museum are you enter the building. It has been undergoing renovation. We have moved in and out several objects and we have explain them in unique and exciting ways, and the viking lander has been conserved and put into an exhibition to tell the story in a wonderful way. So please, come and visit. It would be a pleasure to show you around. I want is a what i want to do today is talk about venus and earth and mars. The Three Sisters when we talk about life in the solar system, and notwithstanding possibilities of moves around a moons around a jupiter and saturn, but i want to take you back to the 19th century to begin with. And just to emphasize, venus and mars have both been places where we have fantasized that might be too strong a term at least, we have speculated that life could have existed there. Venusxt enchanted us enchanted us in all kinds of ways. It is our closest neighbor. It is the closest in size, and then that sheet of clouds around it gave it an aura of mystery that until the space age we were not able to know too much about. Mars has harbored this long believed that might be life there or in the past may have been life. Something that we are exploring today. It was not until we were actually able to send robotic explorers there in the space age that we began to see that these two world were slightly strikingly different than what we anticipated. I dont want to dwell on this picture, but it is basically the goldilocks. Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. Earth is just right that is sort of what we know about it but there is a lot more complexity to it but that is one explanation that makes sense. But venus has always been one also in which we thought there would be the possibilities of life, and there are fascinating theories about this that circulated both in the 19th century as well as into the 20th century. That hope of life has always been present there. I love this quote from an astronomer in 1911. We have reason to believe it is habitable, for the conditions we named as essential to life. Form andr in a liquid temperature, all undoubtedly realized. That is how wrong he was. He is not the only one in that category, and he was a serious astronomer. There was a popular theory that existed and i remember reading , Science Fiction as a kid that sort of took this model. That the sun is gradually cooling, and at least for the terrestrial type planets, as it has done so, each of the planets have been in the socalled goldilocks zone, so mars at one time was and is now a dying planet. Earth is flourishing, and venus is probably a precambrian type of experience, probably with dinosaurs underneath that cloud cover. That was a very common theory. That theory had currency up until the early 1960s, and in a jpl publication about mariner to the first fewr 2 , pages of the book talk about that particular theory, and they were going to try to either confirm or disprove it. Of course, they disprove it very graphically but that was a serious development. I always like to mention this guy because he was also a believer in venus and life existing there. A great part of the service of mars is no doubt venus is no doubt covered in swamps. Corresponding to those on earth in which coal deposits were formed. Most of it up a lot to the vegetable kingdom and the organisms are nearly of the same kind all over the planet. Now, that if 1918. Obviously, there is a lot learned since that time, much of it coming with the ability of nasa, and to a lesser extent the soviet union who sent probes to mars. Venus. Those are the ideas that exist. I do not need to talk about this particular slide. Obviously, we know about the runaway greenhouse effect that was postulated in the first part of the space age that turned out to be correct. Planetary reconnaissance was really something that made it possible for us to come to grips with this question of life beyond earth. We mostly as humans want to believe it is there. In fact, i could take a poll in this room. In fact, i will. How many of you believe that life exists somewhere outside of the planet . How many do not believe . Nobody is willing to raise their hand on that one. Ok, there is a couple. I ask that a lot, and overwhelmingly, people say yes. I believe it is out there. Me, too, by the way, and then i ask the next question, do we have any evidence for it . And we really dont. Not yet. But maybe we will find it. We want to believe it is there, and we have always looked at these planets of venus and mars as sites where this might exist. Well, planetary reconnaissance really became possible with the rise of nasa and the birth of Space Science in the early 1960s. Caltech convened a planetary in 1960. Es conference carl sagan was an organizer with will kellogg. They looked at a number of questions they might be able to explore as they moved beyond this planet to undertake a wreck in order at venus and mars. They helped set the stage for the activity that would follow on both of this plan is struck the 1960s and beyond. There have been a variety of missions to venus. There is a long list of them here. I do not need to read them for you, but i will simply say it has characterized that particular planet as one in which we are reasonably confident, reasonably, that life does not exist, at least not life that is beyond a microorganism stage, although there has been some recent developments in the last 20 years or so that suggested there might be traces of water molecules in venuss atmosphere. What does that mean . We are not sure, but there is still that potential out there, and there are those that hold onto that hope that maybe we will be able to determine something more authoritative and the possibility of life either in the past or even presently existing. It would probably not be life they could communicate with. It is clearly not going to be dinosaurs, which was an earlier concept, but something out there. Mars has always been a place we thought it was there. We truly did. There has been a longstanding Public Interest in mars. We have been observing it for centuries, and astronomers and the general public has developed this whole iconography about what mars is and what we could expect when we got there. In the latter part of the 19th century, Giovanni Schiaparelli lowelllly, percival talked about the canals on mars , and postulated that this was the creation of an advanced civilization. It had to be an advanced civilization, one that was technologically sophisticated or they would not have been able to build those canals to move water from the polls to the center part of the planet. Lowell also wrote a book in 1905 in which he speculated on the nature of all of the activities on mars and created a complete fiction but something he thought was based upon Scientific Data about what civilization on mars might be like. He did not take very long for novelists especially hg wells, to come up with their own and turn it into stories, and war of the worlds was a great example of that. And by the way, from cosmopolitan in 1908, when it ran a serialization of the war of the worlds novel by hg wells, and this is a representation of what they envisioned martian civilization to look like. Since it has lower gravity, they were probably birdlike creatures with feathers. Maybe they can fly. There is all kind of weird speculation that results from this. But it is fueled a whole first half of the 20th century enthusiasm for the potential for life on mars. And it was real. This was not fake stuff. There were scientists who were engaged in this, including a christopher lowell, best Percival Lowell gentleman , scholar, not a trained academic. And as for lowell there, you can on the left the map of mars he created based on his observation. And you can see these canals, long, Straight Lines that he believed would deliver water from places that were barren or desert like. Only in a hydraulic society, it can only exist if you have a strong centralized probably , worldwide structure of organization. And that is the story that came down. So if you ever read any of the Edgar Rice Burroughs john carter stories about barsoom or saw that horrible film called john carter of mars, that was the kind of stuff that was being speculated about. It did not take long to send probes to learn that it was strikingly different. I love this particular picture. Its was a cartoon from the Washington Post in 1964. Its Lyndon Johnson looking at pictures from mariner 4, which reached mars, and his question is, are these of mars or vietnam . Those of you who are a little older may get the joke. Those of you who are a little younger may not. Vietnam was a major conflict of the 1960s in which there was a lot of loss of life and destruction, and he is characterizing something he did not think they would find on mars, craters that were not anticipated at all, and, indeed, i can recall as a kid in Grammar School in the mid1960s, the textbook that we used in science class talked about how they knew there was life there. There had to be life there, because earth observation had seen the pattern changes on the surface and color changes. Plants dying at the end of the season or Something Like that, and the speculation was, well, it is probably not sophisticated life, but Something Like lichens or some kind of plant life that might be doing this. This was the mid1960s. Nevermind the fact that i did go to Public School in south carolina, so that might have made a difference, but my suspicion is that was a textbook that was used a lot at the time in a lot of different places in that same period. And it was not until nasa began to explore mars in a serious way that we began to learn differently. We have learned a great deal about it. By the way, here is one of the images of mariner 4 to give you a sense of what im talking about. Since that time we have flown all kinds of missions to mars. We have characterized it in ways that probably are not a surprise to those who began the exploration in the 1960s. With a series of flybys and some rovers and landers as well. They all have been remarkably important, a set of developments that change the nature of what we think about mars. But our hope, our desire to believe that there is life there has not abated. Or at the very least past life there has not abated, in spite of the fact that we have failed thus far to confirm any evidence, to uncover any evidence to support that contention. Past life probably may be there. We have not found any ironclad to believe it yet. I know some people in the audience might want to argue with me on that. There is no formal, confirming evidence. Viking, of course, is one of the greatest missions nasa has undertaken. There is no question about that. That soft landing on mars in 1976 with those two landers and two orbiters that continue to do important work was an important mission. We had experiments aboard to try to determine if there might be some sort of support for this contention about life. We did not find anything that was a consensus account on this. Orbitersnd one of the the face on mars which has been used by the ufo community for years as a reason to believe it is out there. Of course, mars global surveyor or took a picture of the same location a number of years later and found that that picture that you see at the right, it is just the shadows and the way in which the picture was taken and the time of day that led to that socalled face. Nonetheless, we still see this pop up over and over and over and over. Again, most recently in a really fundamental way and in a feature film that nasa helped with. Called mission to mars, in 2000, i believe, and that become sort of the centerpiece of the end of the story. Oh, my goodness gracious. A bit of a problem. But we have yet to determine whether or not there is life or was life on mars in any defini