Viking 1 landed on Mars 50 years ago

Summary

SCIENCE Viking 1 landed on Mars 50 years ago And would have lasted longer if some code hadn't trampled on places it shouldn't It has been half a century since NASA landed on Mars with the Viking 1 lander.Viking 1, one of a pair of Viking spacecraft, landed on Mars on July 20, 1976. Launched on August 20, 1975, Viking 1 arrived in orbit around Mars on June 19, 1976. The Viking program is, when adjusted for inflation, one of the most expensive robotic missions ever attempted by NASA.The spacecraft consisted of an orbiter, which was eventually shut down on August 7 as its attitude control gas was depleted, and a lander, which became the longest-lived component of the Viking program (and even then, it was only human error that did it in). The original plan had called for a landing on Mars on July 4, 1976, to coincide with the US Bicentennial, but a look at the potential landing site made managers postpone the descent to July 20 – the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing – and a safer destination. The lander was equipped with an ablative heat shield to withstand atmospheric entry. Parachutes slowed the lander as it descended, and retro-rockets fired just above the surface to ensure the three-legged Viking lander reached Martian soil without incident.Viking 1 landed on Mars' Chryse Planitia. It performed the first sampling of Martian soil using its robotic arm and an onboard biological laboratory. While the official word from NASA is that no definitive signs of life were found, debate has continued over the decades that… perhaps… there was something else in the data from the robots. NASA's take was that the "experiments discovered unexpected and enigmatic chemical activity in the Martian soil, but provided no clear evidence for the presence of living microorganisms in soil near the landing sites." Findings from onboard experiments aside, the lander was also equipped with cameras capable of snapping breathtaking vistas of the surface, as well as antennas for ...