Few science experiments have captured the imagination quite so much as NASA’s Viking Mission to Mars in the 1970s and early 80s. Would Viking 1 and Viking 2 indeed find evidence of life on the red planet as so many had hoped? And, if so, would it look more like something out of The War of the Worlds or the Smash adverts?
Despite the best efforts of both orbiters and landers, the Viking program wasn’t able to find any clear evidence of living microorganisms. What it did reveal though, during its characterisation of the structure and composition of the Martian atmosphere and surface, were lots of geological forms associated with water here on earth – from branched stream networks to deep valleys.
As for its other primary mission objective, the Viking program also succeeded in providing high resolution images of the planet’s surface, just not with any little green men photo bombing the foreground.
Having far surpassed its intended mission duration, some of the Viking craft might still have been relaying images and other information back to Earth to this day were it not for a software update. This caused the Viking 1 lander’s antenna to go down in 1982, cutting off all power and communication. Oops!
* All costs calculated in 2017 $US
