Elon Musk wants to find a way to colonize Mars, while astrophysicists from all over the world continue to search for traces of life on the red planet. The most important chapters of the history between the Earth and Mars are still to be written, but, in hindsight, the novel already has several pages. Today, September 3, it falls in fact the 45th anniversary from the first landing of man on the fourth planet of the solar system.
The story is little known because it does not involve astronauts, but it is still one of the most significant space explorations ever. The 3 September of the 1976, the Viking 2 spacecraft of NASA landed on Utopia Planitia, a flat and uniform area of the red planet, where it took the first close-up and color photos of the Martian surface.
The lander was operational for 1.316 days, until April 11, 1980, when its batteries ran out. The orbiter instead (ie the component from which the lander had detached at the time of landing), continued to circle Mars until July 25, 1978, completing 706 orbits.
The analyzes of the lander provided important information on the composition of the planet and its history, but science fiction enthusiasts were disappointed, because the search for traces of life did not give the desired results.
Patricia Straat, a member of the group responsible for one of the operations conducted on Mars, summarizes what happened in these terms: "Our experiment gave positive results in the search for traces of life forms, but a lot of people claimed that be a false positive for a variety of reasons. One of which is the fact that no water was found".
Today, 45 years have passed, the NASA rover active on Mars is that of the probe Perseverance. After failing the first soil sampling last August 6, the spacecraft has targeted a new rock, called "Rochette", which in these days it will try to scratch with its robotic arm to test its consistency, in view of a possible withdrawal of material.
