We have all heard the story of the space race between the United States and the former Soviet Union which began with the launch of the first artificial satellite, the USSR's Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957 and unofficially ended with the first manned landing on the moon on July 20, 1969, by the US crew of Mission Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. The story that is not so often told, however, is that of the unmanned probes that have ventured to those places in the universe that man has yet to go. Here I wish to tell the story of one such probe, the Viking I lander, which on July 20, 1976 (exactly 7 years after the first lunar landing) became the first working device to successfully land on the surface of Mars. This story is one all people should know, for in an age in which we have yet to set a human foot on Mars, the legacy of this manmade mechanical explorer should stand with those of Neil Armstrong and Sputnik.

The name of my website, Chryse Planitia, is the name of the Martian landing site of the Viking I lander. In 1877, Schiaparelli observed with the aid of a telescope a bright region on Mars and named it Chryse after a golden land rumored in ancient times to be located east of the Indian Ocean. Because the Viking I orbiter in Martian orbit observed this region to be dominated by desert plains, the modern topographic name given to this region was Chryse Planitia, which can be translated to mean "plains of the golden land of Chryse."

The purpose of the Viking I mission was to investigate whether water (and perhaps life) had ever existed on Mars. Chryse Planitia was chosen as the landing site, not only because from the Viking I observations it appeared to be very smooth, but also because those same pictures showed large channels running into the desert plains which seemed to indicate that large amounts of water had been emptied into this region. The mission leaders must have thought, "What better place to look for signs of past water than a region into which large amounts of water appeared to have emptied?"

Ultimately, the Viking I lander made some interesting discoveries. First, until the first pictures came back from the lander, scientists had thought that the Martian sky would be blue like our own sky, but as it turns out it is a pinkish tan due to the reddish dust kicked up into the atmosphere by winds and dust storms. As hoped, the lander also found evidence for water in the soil in the form of compounds normally left after evaporation of salty, mineral-rich water. Lastly, the lander found from chemical analyses on the soil that the Martian soil was extremely poor in organic materials. In fact, the soil contained about 1% the organic material commonly found in the soil of barren deserts on Earth. Scientists concluded that the reason for this dearth of organic material is the lack of ultraviolet protection afforded the surface of Mars due to the lack of an ozone layer in the Martian atmosphere. Highly energetic photons that are shielded from the Earth's surface are permitted to pass through the atmosphere on Mars and break up the organic molecule in the Martian soil before they can combine to form more complex structures.

Much of the material on this page was adapted from William K. Hartmann's A Traveler's Guide to Mars, The Mysterious Landscapes of the Red Planet. For anyone interested in an in depth discussion of the history, geography, and topology of Mars, I would strongly recommend taking a look at this book.

Below are a few pictures of the Chyrse Planitia landscape taken by the Viking I lander.