Viking 1’s First Mars Images

On July the 20th 1976, a spacecraft called Viking 1 completed a descent no human

had ever witnessed before, slowing from interplanetary speed to a gentle touchdown on the

rust-colored plains of Chryse Planitia, a broad region near Mars' equator chosen carefully for its

flatness and relative safety. The landing itself took minutes, but what mattered

came later when engineers and scientists on Earth waited for a signal that had to cross over

300 million kilometers of space, traveling at the speed of light, carrying proof that

the spacecraft was not only intact, but awake. Then came the images. They were crude

by modern standards, stitched together line by line, pixel by pixel. But for the first