NASA Tries To Save Data Stored On Film From Viking 1 Mars Landing 40 Years Ago

Forty years ago, NASA made history when the Viking 1 became the very first spacecraft to successfully touch down on Mars.

Four decades later, the race is on to preserve the data that Viking collected, which is stored on ageing microfilm.

Numerous reels of microfilm containing vital readings from the mission was stored away and not looked at again for another 20 years.

“At one time, microfilm was the archive thing of the future,” explained planetary curation scientist David Williams from the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive.

“But people quickly turned to digitizing data when the web came to be. So now we are going through the microfilm and scanning every frame into our computer database so that anyone can access it online.”

The data is set to be transferred from the microfilm so that it can be accessed in future (David Williams)

Now, the race is on to preserve the data so that it can be referred to for future missions to Mars.

"If something were to happen to it, we would lose it forever. I couldn’t just give someone the microfilm to borrow because that’s all there was,” said Williams.

Crucial data from the Viking 1 mission, and the subsequent Viking 2 landing, was used to build the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument which is currently being used by the Curiosity rover as it searches the Martian surface for traces of life.

The Viking 1 spacecraft landed in Mars on 20 July 1976 (NASA)

"We built SAM based on a lot of experience and heritage from Viking,” said Danny Glavin, associate director for Strategic Science in the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA.

“The capabilities of the Viking landers and instruments were very advanced for the technology at the time. Just demonstrating that you could land a spacecraft on the Martian surface successfully was a huge feat.”

“The point is for the community to have access to this data so that scientists 50 years from now can go back and look at it,” he added.

Image credit: David Williams