Viking 1

I guess because most people believe it.

What happened was that the first time we were able to land, put landers down on the surface of Mars and take pictures from the surface was in 1976 with Viking 1 and Viking 2, the first two probes that actually landed on the surface of Mars successfully and sent the pictures back.

The really, you know, the thing about that experience was that at the time there was a Dr. Gil Levin who was the designer of the labeled release experiment.

Now the labeled release experiment is one of the four tests on the Viking landers that were supposed to test for life.

It was a box office success.

The U.S. Viking 1 lander landed on Mars safely.

Its mission was to land on the Martian surface in order to conduct scientific experiments and take photos.

It remained operational until NASA lost contact six years later.

So they're like, oh, you know what? We'll make it an anniversary of Apollo 11 instead.

That spacecraft sharing its name with the Minnesota Vikings, Viking 1.

All right, number four, first introduced in 1966.

This SUV was discontinued in 1996 before returning in 2021.

Yes.

We strapped the Viking 1 spacecraft to a massive Titan rocket and hurled it 420 million miles across the void.

It took nearly a year of travel just to get there.

Which is wild.

A closer look was needed.

NASA landed Viking 1 and 2 on the surface of Mars in 1976.

They conducted four experiments looking for the biosignatures of past or present microbial life.

Three of the tests were negative, but the fourth was positive.

Today, we're traveling to Mars to investigate a sound so small it was almost ignored, a tiny crackle that could hold the key to how Mars' atmosphere works, how its storms form, its surface chemistry, and whether humans could one day safely walk its surface.

The first lander to touch down on the Martian surface was NASA's Viking 1 in 1976, shortly followed by its sister probe, Viking 2, a few months later.

These two landers provided the first close-up color images of the Martian surface we've ever seen, revealing a red-brown landscape under a dusty orange sky.

Since then, we've successfully sent eight more landers and rovers to the surface, two of which are still active at the time of publishing this video: NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.

A dozen small spacecraft have already landed successfully on Mars since the 1970s.

There was Mars 3, sent by the Soviet space program, and Viking 1 and 2, sent by NASA.

Then there was a long period when funding issues and other priorities put missions to Mars on hold.

They resumed about 20 years later, in the 1990s.