Viking program

And that modern attention really culminated in the summer of 1975, August 20th to be exact.

The Viking mission.

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.

The Viking mission is a perfect example of this deep-seated exploratory drive you're talking about.

You have to consider the risk-to-reward ratio here.

Is there life on Mars? That's the question NASA wanted its first Mars mission to answer in 1976.

They designed the remarkable Viking rover, well before modern computers, to collect and test soil samples 140 million miles from Earth.

First, Viking added a nutrient solution to the soil, looking for carbon dioxide that microbes would produce if they consumed it, and the test showed a small amount.

Next, Viking incubated the sample to see if microbes, if present, could produce organic matter, and a tiny amount was detected.

But the third test would be conclusive.

The rover incinerated the soil to gasify its compounds, then used a spectrometer to evaluate them.

If there were organic matter, it would surely show up, but it didn't.

At the time, the answer was no life on Mars.

On this episode, the search for life on Mars, audacious missions, complicated machinery, and conversations with Martians.

To get started, let's hear more about the Viking mission, which landed on Mars 50 years ago.

Viking 1 got there on July 20th, 1976, becoming the first spacecraft to successfully land on the Red Planet.

Its twin, Viking 2, arrived a few weeks later on September 3rd.

And that meant that all of the other data that was still being gathered was really not given the limelight, was not given the attention that it deserved.

In addition, It created what a lot of people considered a black eye for NASA.

And the Viking mission itself has been badmouthed by scientists and engineers all across the globe, including NASA employees, because they said it failed to find life, which is not accurate.

She says in the wake of this perceived failure, the mission was largely swept under the rug.