Toolmaker celebrated

The New York Times has an obituary for Peter Staudhammer, a designer of tools and machines for NASA’s landing missions on the Moon and Mars.

In the 1960s, while working for the defense contractor TRW, Dr. Staudhammer was the engineer in charge of developing a way to put a manned spacecraft safely on the surface of the Moon. His team developed a powerful throttling engine that allowed astronauts to control the descent of the lunar lander, softening its landings in the historic series of manned lunar missions that began in 1969.

Later, in the 1970s, Dr. Staudhammer helped design the compact traveling laboratory that accompanied the Viking missions to Mars. The laboratory, known as the Viking biology instrument package, was placed on the planet’s surface, where it heated soil samples, studied the resulting gases and relayed the findings from the scene. Scientists of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had hoped to discover conditions favorable to primitive life — and perhaps even find single-cell organisms — but the instruments revealed what was an essentially sterile environment.