Launch of Viking 1

Viking 1 was one of two identical NASA spacecraft, each made up of an orbiter and a lander, sent to Mars in the mid-1970s. It was launched on a Titan IIIE-Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral and entered Mars orbit in June 1976. The lander touched down in the Chryse Planitia region the following month and became the first American spacecraft to operate successfully on the Martian surface. Its instruments photographed the landscape, recorded the weather and analyzed the soil, and its biology experiments gave results that are still debated but are generally not read as evidence of life. The lander kept working for more than six years, and the orbiter's images were used to map the planet for decades afterward.

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