Viking 1 mars landing: 50 years since first photos

Twenty-five seconds after touchdown, a spacecraft on another world took a photograph, and human beings saw the surface of Mars for the very first time.

Viking 1 landed on Chryse Planitia at 07:53am EDT on 20 July 1976, which was 7 years to the day after Apollo 11 first landed on the moon. The original landing date on 4 July was meant to coincide with the US bicentennial, but NASA had missed a landing opportunity when searching for a flat landing area.

Mission controllers then waited 19 minutes for a radio signal to arrive from the spacecraft, which was 212 million miles (341 million km) away in space.

Forty minutes after landing, the confirming photograph began forming on monitors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, building left to right in narrow strips.

Dr Thomas Mutch, who led the Viking imaging team, recalled watching rocks, sand and one of the lander's own footpads emerge from the static, later saying simply, "It's incredible." A colour image followed the next day, with a full panorama arriving days later.

The Viking mission has two landers and two orbiters. The Viking two landed on Utopia Planitia six weeks later than its sister ship. The 2 orbiters sent more than 52,000 pictures of Mars from JPL. The landers performed the first-ever experiments to test whether or not there is life on Mars.

NASA drew a particular conclusion from their findings: that there was no evidence to support biological life, but the debate would not end there, stating that while some scientists believed the experiment did find evidence of life, others argued the tests might have destroyed the evidence they were trying to find.

Viking 1 ended its mission thirteen years after its launch when a computer malfunction caused a loss of signal, but since then other missions have found compelling evidence for life on Mars, keeping the questions raised and unanswered by Vikings 1 and 2 very much alive.