Viking (rocket) - Achievements

Achievements

While the underlying motivation for the Viking Project clearly had a national defense component, since it was a US Navy program, it nevertheless established a number of early space exploration landmarks, some technological and some scientific.

Peaceful space travel and space exploration were clearly important objectives that energized many of the higher level instigators even of the German V-2 rocket program, which was funded by the German Army entirely for military purposes. Viking was probably the most ambitious program up to its time which had significant objectives that were essentially scientific, accompanied by a desire to explore and advance rocket technology for more ambitious peaceful space exploration goals, such as artificial earth satellites.

Technological advances pioneered by Viking included the following:

• An essentially all-aluminum airframe, with a "mass ratio", of fueled to empty vehicle mass, of about 5:1 for the improved (Viking 8 and later) model, a significant improvement over the V-2, which was largely constructed of steel. The altitude records achieved by Viking, for a single-stage rocket, were mostly the result of its light-weight structure.

• Thrust vector control by gimbaling the rocket motor, as opposed to the graphite vanes used by the German V-2 and the U.S. Army Redstone missiles. This method of control has become standard since, both for reliability and efficiency reasons.

• Control of the vehicle's orientation, after fuel exhaustion of the main engine, by small auxiliary jets, permitting programmed pointing of scientific instruments, etc.

• Extensive radio telemetry for both engineering and scientific data, which greatly reduced the number of test flights needed before useful results were obtained.

Among its scientific achievements, firsts up to their time, were:

• The highest measurement of atmospheric density (by Viking 7).

• The highest measurement of atmospheric winds (Viking 7).

• The first measurements of the atmospheric positive ion composition at high altitude (Viking 10).

• The highest exposures of cosmic-ray emulsions (Vikings 9, 10, and 11).

• The highest altitude photographs of the Earth (Viking 11).

Through the Viking flights, NRL was first to measure temperature, pressure, and winds in the upper atmosphere and electron density in the ionosphere, and to record the ultraviolet spectra of the Sun.