How a Mars mission from the 1970s shaped the search for extraterrestrial life today

In 1975, NASA launched two spacecraft to Mars. Viking 1 and Viking 2 arrived at their destination less than a year later, each bringing a lander to explore the surface of the planet and an orbiter to survey above. What was supposed to be a 90 day mission ended up lasting until the early 1980s. Those years provided scientists with important data about the Martian landscape, from seismometer readings of marsquakes to the reddish color of the sky.

But the Viking missions had another important task: they were going to look for possible signs of life. The Viking experiments would go on to become an important landmark in science, one that’s helped researchers in a number of fields figure out what we can be doing better to find signs of life beyond Earth.

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