Viking Mars Lander 3D Model

The Viking lander, the spacecraft behind the first successful US landings on Mars: Viking 1 touched down on 20 July 1976 and Viking 2 followed that September. The model shows the six-sided body on its three legs and footpads, the high-gain dish on its mast, the sampler arm that scooped soil for the life-detection experiments, and the antennas and instruments around the deck.

Technical details: about 65,500 polygons and 35,000 vertices, with 9 colour materials and no image textures. That is light enough for real-time scenes and web viewers. It is scaled to 3 metres for AiZity's catalogue scale.

The download includes GLB for web viewers and three.js, FBX for Unity, Unreal Engine and Maya, OBJ as a widely supported mesh, and BLEND for Blender. AiZity cleaned up the original (centred, grounded and renamed the parts) and converted it to these formats.

Good for Mars exploration history lessons, landing site dioramas, planetary science presentations and 1970s spaceflight documentaries.

License: Public domain, made by NASA/Michael D. Carbajal (a U.S. government work). Free for personal and commercial use; please credit NASA. NASA logos and insignia are not included, and use must not suggest NASA endorsement.