Re: Viking lander imagery from MRO

There doesn't appear to much info out there on the actual material.
Much is said that the designers of the Viking chutes got it right the
first time and (other landers) have followed suit in the design. In
some of the new landers kevlar risers have been used as some other
exotic materials for the rigging. I don't recall if kevlar was
available to JPL back then. I don't see the process of a trip to mars
and supersonic reentry putting a lot more strain on chute design that
has (had) been experienced here on earth. (look at the SRB's,
supersonic ejection etc etc). The parachutes were sufficiently buried
in the structure of the spacecraft that thermal cycling was not a big
factor. I'm guessing here but velocity reduction by the chutes was not
quite as severe as it would be on earth due to the density of the
martian atmoshpere. My guess nothing really exotic (read, "do not
resue after 30 years") in those chute
canopies........................Doc

On Dec 5, 4:19 pm, Pat Flannery <flan...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
robert casey wrote:

Would the parachute material stand up to 30 years of UV light from the
Sun? Seems that on Earth the Sun's UV light (what gets past the ozone
layer here) tends to destroy many artificial materials. I would
expect the fabric to have gotten brittle and be in small tattered
pieces by now.I haven't been able to track down what the Viking chute was made of, but
the ones used on MER are nylon and polyester, and are supposed to be
largly based on Viking design.

Pat

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