Through the initiative of UW Research Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Jim Tillman, and the unprecedented efforts of his staff, and the staff of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the NASA Deep Space Network, the life of Lander 1 was more than doubled to 2,245 sols. This included expanding the role of his Viking Computer Facility , VCF, 1) acquire and process raw lander data, 2) to extract, process and analyze meteorology data, and 3) to extract and process engineering data for the spacecraft Mission Operations team at JPL. The http://www.atmos.washington.edu/local-httpdocs/k12/viking_history_npug_84.html paper provides an overview of Viking, testing of the Viking Meteorology Instrument System, VMIS, in the NASA Langley Research Center's Transonic Dynamics Tunnel, TDT, one of the world's major wind tunnels. The significance of our development of the VCF for TDT testing can be garnered from the facts that we were given two weeks during 1975 in the TDT, (1975 cost of $4,000/hour), the tunnel consumes 1,000,000 watts at idle, is scheduled years in advance, and we were allocated the F-18's scheduled time slot. Test Results were analyzed by upgrading our VCF computer to SN 2 of the first major super-mini computer in 1976.
The VCF served science analyses and operations at JPL, and when moved back to UW after the end of Viking's "90 day mission" operations in 1976, where it played a key, and later singular role in producing the meteorology science record, providing these data products to the community and the NASA Planetary Data System. The VCF continues to operate at UW, preserving all resources and documentation, and has been personally maintained by Tillman since 1995. It runs both its native operating system and Unix! Highly automated, flexible software, procedures, and archiving of products in relational data bases, dramatically simplifies experiments, the development of upgraded and expanded versions of the Viking Meteorology resources, and provide Internet access all these resources and to any experiments raw data. Access to our version of the archived Viking Meteorology Data, "Mars Meteorological Data and Graphs: Pathfinder and Viking", is permanently on line.