NASA History News & Notes

JULY 2026 • Volume 43, Number 6

CONTENTS

Viking’s legacy lives on 50 years after the first American Mars landing
Coming soon: the continued story of NASA’s Discovery Program
Get the Fiscal Year 2025 issue of the Aeronautics and Space Report of the President
Join our next NASA History Speaker Series presentation
Trivia challenge: Gemini X’s missing photos

MARS EXPLORATION HISTORY

Our First Look at the Surface of Mars

And How Viking Shaped the 50 Years Since

“Touchdown, we have touchdown!” At 5:12 a.m. PDT, July 20, 1976, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) erupted in cheers as they learned that the Viking 1 lander had successfully survived its descent through the thin Martian atmosphere. Forty minutes later, the lander’s first image began to slowly appear, line by line. For the first time, humans were able to see Mars’s rocky terrain from its surface.

Viking Lander 1's first image from the surface of Mars, July 20, 1976. A footpad of the lander is visible in the lower right corner. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers, each built to last 90 days, continued to return images and data for years, with the Viking 1 lander transmitting data back to Earth until November 1982.

Together, the Viking orbiters and landers gave us our first understandings of Martian weather as well as its surface temperature, chemistry, and terrain. Frustratingly, the first-of-their-kind biology experiments on the landers yielded weakly positive results that could be ascribed to biological processes, but could also be the result of purely chemical processes, leaving no conclusive evidence of life on Mars.

Two men check out the full-scale Viking lander on display at JPL in March 1976.

Dr. William Pickering, JPL Director, and Robert Finch, Lieutenant Governor of California, inspect the full-scale Viking Lander on display at JPL in March 1976. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The nationwide team of planners, engineers, and scientists, directed by a formidable leader, Jim Martin, were “the best of the best.” Martin’s leadership style demanded excellence but provided those working on the project with opportunities to develop. Gus Guastaferro, the Viking Management Operations Manager commented, “Many Viking team members dedicated nearly a decade to the formulation, development, and operation of the Viking project. Each of us was provided an opportunity to grow as engineers, scientists, and leaders.” After Viking, many of them were promoted into further leadership roles. Alphonso V. Diaz, a protégé of Guastaferro, went on to serve as the Director of Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science. A. Thomas Young started as Viking’s science integration manager, later becoming the mission director, and eventually a Lockheed Martin vice president.

Vintage infographic explaining the "Viking '75" mission.

Flyer produced by NASA’s Langley Research Center outlining Project Viking. Credit: NASA

The data provided by Viking also inspired a new generation of scientists to dedicate their lives to planetary exploration. Steve Squyres, the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover project, was a student at Cornell University in 1977. Looking for a topic for a class term paper, he asked to view the Viking 1 orbiter photographs sent to his professor Joe Veverka, a member of the Viking science team. In his August 22, 2017 oral history interview, he describes the day. "I just pulled some of the binders off the shelves and figured I would spend 15 or 20 minutes flipping through the pictures and see if I could come up with an idea for a term paper. I was in that room for four hours, and I walked out of there knowing exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was an absolutely transformational moment for me, because this was the blank canvas I had been looking for."

Color image taken by Viking 1 showing the large boulder nicknamed Big Joe.

A Viking 1 Lander surface panorama shows the rocky terrain of Mars, including “Big Joe,” a roughly 2-meter long boulder about 8 meters from the lander which would have spelled the end of the mission had it landed on that spot. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Viking required entirely new engineering solutions for landing on another planet. Supersonic parachutes able to withstand incredible force, special retrorockets that would not bake the soil under the lander in its final descent, sterilization protocols to protect Mars from Earth microbes, and the first miniaturized instrument packages to search for signs of life were each painstakingly devised. These innovations helped pave the way for later Mars landers and rovers, saving time and cost for subsequent missions.

That first glimpse of the rocky Martian terrain, seen for the first time 50 years ago this week, was just an initial payoff after the Viking team’s years of preparation. Viking’s legacy has resonated in the subsequent decades not only through its discoveries at Mars, but as a result of its breakthroughs in spacecraft engineering, and role as a catalyst for personal transformation.

The JPL Archives Staff and

Michele Ostovar, NASA History Communications Lead

Videos, articles and images celebrating Viking's 50th Anniversary

Astrobiology's Viking 50th Anniversary Special Collection Issue

Explore Viking Through NASA History Resources

The NASA History Office offers extensive resources for researchers wishing to explore the Viking mission in depth.

On Mars: Exploration of the Red Planet, 1958–1978 (NASA SP-4212), written by Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neuman Ezell, traces the Viking mission from its origins through the end of the extended mission.

Viking mission leader in JPL mission control watches his monitor on July 20, 1976

The NASA History Office’s oral history collection holds interviews with engineers, scientists, and managers who made Viking possible. These transcripts offer an irreplaceable human dimension to the technical record and are available to researchers online.

The JPL Archives holds 93.8 cubic feet of Viking project material, including project documents, mission analysis and design materials, flight operations and mission control documents, and an extensive photo negative collection spanning the full arc of the mission. These collections are accessible by contacting the JPL Archives directly at archives@jpl.nasa.gov.

NASA HISTORY SERIES

The Continued Story of NASA's Discovery Program

The next title in the NASA History Series — NASA's Discovery Program: Competitive Planetary Exploration in the 21st Century by David W. Brown — is now in production and slated for release this fall.

Picking up where NASA's Discovery Program: The First Twenty Years of Competitive Planetary Exploration left off, this new volume chronicles the program's missions and milestones from 2011 through 2025. This engaging book offers an in-depth look at more than a decade of innovative planetary exploration and continues the story of focused cost-capped planetary science investigations.

PUBLICATIONS

Now Available: The FY 2025 Aeronautics and Space Report of the President

Front cover of the FY 2025 edition of the Aeronautics and Space Report of the President.

The Fiscal Year 2025 edition of the Aeronautics and Space Report of the President, coordinated by staff in the NASA History Office, is now available! You can access this report and all previous reports going back to 1958 online.

Produced in coordination with more than a dozen agencies of the U.S. government, the Aeronautics and Space Report of the President fulfills a statutory requirement to provide Congress a description of the annual program activities and accomplishments of all agencies of the United States in aeronautics and space. Preparations for the production of the Fiscal Year 2026 report, covering October 1, 2025, through September 30, 2026, are now underway!

SPEAKER SERIES

Reminder: Join the Next Presentation in Our Speaker Series

5 women prepare to dive into water from a platform

Five women that inhabited the Tektite II underwater laboratory train for their 1970 mission. Credit: OAR/National Undersea Research Program (NURP); National Park Service/C. Stoughton

On Wednesday, July 29 at 12:00 pm EDT, space historian and curator emerita of the National Air and Space Museum Valerie Neal will present “NASA’s First and Only Mission with an All-Women Crew.”

In 1970, the all-woman crew of Tektite II gave NASA its first look at women as potential astronauts and was, in effect, NASA’s first mission to include women, not to mention the agency’s only all-women crew.

TRIVIA CHALLENGE

Gemini X's Missing Photos

July 18 marks the 60th anniversary of NASA’s Gemini X mission, the eighth crewed flight of NASA’s Gemini program. Along with rendezvousing with two separate targets and completing two spacewalks, astronauts John Young and Michael Collins set a new altitude record for human flight in July 1966, making progress on a number of the important prerequisites for landing the first astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade.

Michael Collins was the third American astronaut to perform a spacewalk. Why do we not have any photos from this extravehicular activity?

View from the Gemini X window showing Earth's limb and the Agena target vehicle

Astronauts John Young and Michael Collins capture the Agena Target Docking Vehicle through the window of the Gemini X spacecraft on July 18, 1966. Credit: NASA

Collins' camera malfunctioned and the film didn't advance

Collins was too busy trying to not get wrapped in his umbilical

Collins' camera worked itself free and floated off into space

All of Collins' photos were out of focus so NASA didn't publish them

Click on your choice to reveal the correct answer.

NASA History

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Visit www.nasa.gov/history