The Viking 1 Lander shut itself down and ended communication with earth on November 13, 1982 after what NASA described as ‘an errant command’.
Does anyone know the full story? Did someone accidentally bump the big red button marked “self-destruct” or what?
I’m sure it was common knowledge at the time but I don’t know and the NASA website seems to be pretty coy about the details
Not me (just in case we need to do process of elimination).
I suppose the suggestion of it sighting green men waving “Yankee Go Home” banners would just be scoffed at?
I looked all over the 'net a while back, trying to figure this out myself. I noticed that, of the sites that bothered to say anything beyond “the mission ended on”, the verbiage was exactly the same, leading me to believe there’s some single source paper out there that’s a bit light on facts itself.
I just looked for a while and can’t find anything more than “a faulty command sent by ground control resulted in loss of contact.” It’s surprising that most pages on NASA about the lander fail to mention that.
You can go to this page and contact the guy listed at the bottom if you really want to know. Mention something about the Freedom of Information Act. 
You might also want to suggest that on future missions they locate the “Permanently Shut Down” button a little further from the “Send Mission Data” button. :rolleyes:
I bet it was some manager trying to show the staff how to do their job more efficently.
‘No don’t review the code with 3 technicians, just send it and get to the next thing… Whoops, if anyone ever mentions this to anyone you will never work on this planet again’
It was because they made the shut down command a function of the START button.
Thanks for that.
Pure speculation: By the time Viking 1 was accidentally shut down, I believe one Orbiter was deactivated and the other was out of propellant. The problem might have been that the wake-up command took too long to transmit for the immobile Orbiter to convey it, even when it was passing directly overhead.
If that’s the case, I wonder if it might be possible to use the several communications satellites orbiting Mars today to try mimicing the wake-up call. NASA had a nasty habit of laying off workers on a particular project once it was complete, so even if they could reawaken the craft they might have a hard time finding enough people who remember how it works.