Viking 1: 50 years since the first successful landing on Mars

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0300

On July 20, 1976, at 11:53 UTC, a 230 kHz computer landed a probe on Mars. With no human supervision possible. Nobody at NASA knew whether it had worked until eleven minutes later.

The mission that almost debuted on the Fourth of July

The Viking program was NASA's most ambitious bet on answering the oldest question about Mars: is there anything alive there? Each mission consisted of two modules — an orbiter, which would circle the planet doing mapping work, and a lander, which would descend to the surface.

Viking 1 on Locodigital

Viking 1: 50 years since the first successful landing on Mars

The mission that almost debuted on the Fourth of July