File:Andy Weir, author of The Martian, holds a Mars rock for the first time.jpg

English: Filming in my office with space artifacts all around….

The latest arrival, in the red frame, is a production engine from the Mars Viking spacecraft program used for the first landing on Mars. Seemed topical! His book is in production to be a movie by Ridley Scott with Matt Damon as the Martian.

Constructed from Beryllium, Columbium, and stainless steel by North American Rockwell/Rocketdyne, the engine provided propulsion to take the Mars bound orbiter with its attached lander to Mars and an orbital insertion around the planet. The engine was produced by Rocketdyne for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and includes gimbal attachments which allowed the engine to be adjusted on a rotational axis for in-flight course corrections. It's beryllium thrust chamber was derived from the Minuteman ballistic missile program.

NASA sent two Viking spacecraft to Mars in the summer of 1976, and each comprised of an orbiter, which photographed the surface, and a lander, which studied the surface and conducted several experiments. The whole spacecraft orbited the planet for approximately one month, using the images relayed back to mission control to identify a landing site. The landers then separated and soft landed on the Martian surface, touching down in July and September of 1976.

It was a special honor to hand Andy his first rock from Mars. I am going to try to let him get one of his own.