The oldest human-made artifact still sitting on the surface of Mars.
This is the exact resting place of the Viking 1 lander, the first spacecraft to successfully touch down and operate on Mars, on July 20, 1976. The lander itself still sits here on Chryse Planitia — the oldest human artifact on the Martian surface.
Claim your plot here →Viking 1 was the first fully successful landing on Mars, arriving days after the U.S. Bicentennial. It returned the first clear color photographs from the Martian surface, showing a rust-red rocky plain under a pinkish sky, and ran biology experiments that sampled the soil for signs of life — with famously ambiguous results.
The lander kept working for over six years until a faulty command ended contact in November 1982, a longevity record at the time. NASA renamed the site the Thomas A. Mutch Memorial Station, and the spacecraft still stands here — a monument to the first machine that lived and worked on another planet.