Dual NASA Viking landers searched for life on Mars in 1976. Credit: NASA

July 20 marked the 50th anniversary of one of the biggest robotic spaceflight achievements in NASA’s history: the landing of the Viking 1 spacecraft on Mars. It was the first fully successful Mars landing — the Soviet Union’s Mars 3 landed in 1971 but stopped transmitting seconds later — and carried a suite of instruments to study the planet, including those seeking evidence of life. (The results continue to be debated to this day.)

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Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science...