Seven years to the day after Apollo 11, NASA's Viking 1 lander touched down on Mars on 20 July 1976 in Chryse Planitia, the first successful landing on the planet. It sent back the first colour pictures from the surface, showing a rust-red desert strewn with rocks, and sampled the soil with experiments designed to detect microbial life. The results were ambiguous and are still debated, but most scientists concluded that there was no life. The lander operated for more than six years and its sister craft Viking 2 landed in September.
Before and after
- 26 May 1976Death of Martin Heidegger
- 26 June 1976Construction of CN Tower
- 4 July 1976Entebbe raid
- 18 July 1976Nadia Comaneci scores the first perfect 10 in Olympic gymnastics
- 20 July 1976Viking 1 lands on Mars
- 28 July 19761976 Tangshan earthquake
- 9 August 1976Launch of Luna 24
- 15 August 1976Birth of Abiy Ahmed
- 18 August 1976Korean axe murder incident
More in Exploration & discovery
- from 4 October 1957 to 1 July 1975Space race
- 23 January 1960Piccard and Walsh reach the bottom of the Challenger Deep
- 24 December 1968Apollo 8 orbits the Moon and photographs Earthrise
- 14 December 1972Apollo 17: the last humans leave the Moon
- 14 July 2015New Horizons flies by Pluto
- 19 April 2021Ingenuity makes the first powered flight on another planet
The era
This moment belongs to the Contemporary world (1945 CE to today), the world since 1945. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.