Scientists received data from the surface of Mars for the first time 50 years ago this week. NASA’s Viking 1 mission achieved the first successful soft-landing on another planet on July 20th, 1976. Mission planners managed to set the spacecraft on the martian surface seven years to the day after Apollo 11 achieved the first crewed landing on the Moon.
Astro-biologist David Grinspoon of the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute believes humans will eventually follow Viking’s path.
“It’s probably the easiest place to imagine humans going to live on the surface of any other planet in the solar system," he said. "Not that it would be easy. It would make Antarctica seem like a balmy picnic.”
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