{"id":62994,"date":"2026-07-20T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/?guid=8928ae1abe6dc7c17eb6f36fa4e68b63"},"modified":"2026-07-20T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T18:00:00","slug":"50-years-after-viking-1s-historic-mars-landing-nasa-is-looking-to-the-red-planets-skies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/fugic\/2026\/07\/20\/50-years-after-viking-1s-historic-mars-landing-nasa-is-looking-to-the-red-planets-skies\/","title":{"rendered":"50 years after Viking 1’s historic Mars landing, NASA is looking to the Red Planet’s skies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n
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Half a century after first putting hardware down on Mars, NASA is looking to explore the Red Planet's skies.<\/p>

On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1<\/u><\/a> lander touched down in the western reaches of Chryse Planitia (the \"Golden Plain\"), a large circular landform that lies 22.5 degrees north of the Martian equator.<\/p>

It was the first-ever Mars<\/u><\/a> landing for NASA. Viking 1, along with its twin Viking 2, went on to conduct the first fully successful mission on the Red Planet's surface. (The Soviet Union's Mars 3 probe survived its touchdown attempt on Dec. 2, 1971 but died less than two minutes later.) And those missions have left a rich and intriguing legacy.<\/p>

\"photo<\/p><\/div><\/div>

The first color image ever captured on the surface of Mars. NASA's Viking 1 lander took this photo on July 21, 1976. <\/span>(Image credit: NASA)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>

Viking 1 and Viking 2<\/u><\/a> \u2014 which touched down in a different Red Planet region on Sept. 3, 1976 \u2014 were sent to the surface to search for signs of life on Mars<\/u><\/a>. (Each mission also featured an orbiter, which studied the planet from above.)<\/p>

The landers did this using three different experiments, two of which returned negative results. But the third, called Labeled Release (LR), was different. LR observed a steady stream of carbon dioxide gas coming from dirt into which it had introduced nutrients \u2014 a possible sign of microbial metabolism.<\/p>

Some scientists deemed the LR results a likely life detection<\/u><\/a>. But most disagreed, ascribing them to abiotic reactions and stressing that, overall, the Viking data paint a picture of a dead planet.<\/p>

That disagreement illustrates one of the main legacies of the Viking program: It showed researchers that hunting for extraterrestrial life<\/u><\/a> is a complicated business, and they needed to learn more about Mars before attempting the search again on the Red Planet.<\/p>