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Viking Lander at the Museum of Flight: Looking inside

Viking Lander at the Museum of Flight: Looking inside
Viking Lander at the Museum of Flight: Looking inside This view looks steeply down on an edge of the lander body. An open panel reveals part of the machined aluminum Equipment Plate which spans almost the entire interior, located a few inches below the top cover. Puffy white insulation blankets surround the area with two large irregular holes. The Mars soil inlets for the Biology and the Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer instruments would protrude up through those two holes. The missing instruments allow us to see the white insulation laying at the bottom of the lander interior. Tom Dahl