Our First View of the Surface of Mars
On the morning of July 20, 1976, roughly 40 minutes after mission controllers received word that the Viking 1 lander had successfully touched down on the surface of Mars, this photo gave us our first view from the surface of another planet. NASA/JPL “Touchdown, we have touchdown!” At 5:12 a.m. PDT, July 20, 1976, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory erupted in cheers as they learned that the Viking 1 lander had survived its descent through the thin Martian atmosphere. Forty minutes later, the lander’s first image began to appear on their monitors, slowly forming line by line from left to right. For the first time, humans were able to see Mars’s rocky terrain from its surface. Dr. Thomas Mutch, leader of the Viking lander imaging team, described the moment: “I studied the black screen, waiting for that narrow strip that will signal the first few lines of the first picture. And it appeared. A sliver of electronic magic. Areas of brightness and darkness. The pict...
