Viking 2 landing in Utopia Planitia

Viking 2 · 1976 CE – 1980 CE · Mars

Viking 2 landing in Utopia Planitia — Viking 2 · 1976 CE – 1980 CE · Mars — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Repeat the Viking experiments at a second site farther north, where the team hoped for more water.

Historical context

Viking 2 entered orbit on 7 August 1976 to find a landing site farther north, where the team hoped for more water. Its planned site, Cydonia, proved too rough, and after weeks of searching an exhausted team chose Utopia Planitia, about 6,460 kilometres from Viking 1. The lander came down on 3 September 1976, tilted on a rock-strewn plain, and worked until April 1980, through two northern winters in which a thin frost formed on the ground around it.

The voyage, step by step

  1. North to Utopia

    7 August 1976

    Viking 2 entered orbit on 7 August 1976 to find a landing site in the north, where the team hoped for more water. Its planned site, Cydonia, near 44 degrees north, looked too rough in the orbiters’ pictures, and so did a site on Alba Patera; on 21 August the project chose Utopia Planitia, on the far side of the planet from Viking 1.

  2. A leg on a rock

    3 September 1976

    On 3 September 1976 the lander set down in Utopia Planitia at 22:37 Universal Time, as the event happened on Mars, and at 9:49 in the morning, local time at the site. One footpad came to rest on a rock, and the lander leaned about eight degrees.

  3. White ground in winter

    13 September 1977

    In the northern winter of 1977 a thin white coating of frost formed on the rocks and soil around the lander and stayed for about a hundred days. In 1979, one Martian year later, it appeared again almost exactly on time.

  4. Close to Deimos

    1977 CE

    While the lander worked below, its orbiter made close passes of the outer moon, Deimos, in 1977; Asif Siddiqi’s chronicle for NASA gives the closest as 28 km. The pictures showed a surface buried in dust.

  5. Silence in Utopia

    April 1980

    The lander was shut down in April 1980 after more than three and a half years on the surface: on 11 April, when its batteries failed, by NASA’s archive, or on 12 April by the project’s history. No spacecraft landed on Mars again until Pathfinder in 1997, twenty-one years after the Viking landings.

Outcome

More than three and a half years on the surface, the only working Viking seismometer, frost on the ground in two winters, and almost 16,000 images from its orbiter.

Viking 2

Second Viking orbiter and lander; the lander worked in Utopia Planitia from September 1976 to April 1980 and photographed frost on the ground.

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Sources

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