News 40 years since Viking, scientists still on the hunt for life on Mars July 25, 2016 Stephen Clark Four decades after NASA’s Viking landers acquired humanity’s first view of the surface of Mars, a planet whose reality lived in the imaginations of skywatchers for millennia, a definitive smoking gun for microbial life there still eludes scientists.
News July 20, 1976: Landing on the red planet July 20, 2016 Justin Ray Today marks the 40th anniversary — July 20, 1976 — of the first U.S. robotic landing on another planet by the Viking 1 spacecraft on Mars.