The mission that proved Mars has weather, seasons and a story to tell.
Chryse Planitia — the "Plains of Gold" — is the broad lowland where NASA's Viking 1 became the first spacecraft to land and operate successfully on Mars in 1976. From here, Viking 1 watched Martian seasons turn and measured the composition of the thin, cold atmosphere for the first time.
Claim your plot here →Chryse Planitia sits at the mouth of enormous outflow channels, a lowland scoured long ago by catastrophic floods of liquid water. Viking 1's cameras and weather sensors ran for years, recording daily temperature swings, wind, atmospheric pressure changes, and the seasonal ebb and flow of the Martian year — the first long-term weather record from another world.
The lander confirmed the air was almost entirely carbon dioxide, thin and frigid, and documented dust and frost cycles across the seasons. Its biology experiments searched the soil for life and returned puzzling, still-debated results. Together with its orbiter, Viking 1 transformed Mars from a telescope blur into a real, weather-driven planet.