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, higher-latitude site.

Historical context

A second lander was insurance as much as science, and it was sent far enough north to have a real winter. Viking 2 came down tilted on a plain of fractured blocks and photographed, two years running, a thin white frost that no telescope could have shown. Its weather log ran for four years.

The voyage, step by step

  1. North to Utopia

    1976 CE

    The second lander was aimed 1,500 km north of its twin, far enough to have a proper winter.

  2. A leg on a rock

    3 September 1976

    On 3 September 1976 the lander settled on a plain of fractured blocks with one footpad on a stone, leaning eight degrees.

  3. White ground in winter

    1977 CE

    In the winter of 1977 a thin white coating spread over the rocks and stayed for about a hundred days.

  4. Twenty-eight kilometres from Deimos

    1977 CE

    While the lander worked below, its orbiter swung within 28 km of the outer moon and photographed a surface buried in dust.

  5. Silence in Utopia

    April 1980

    Battery failure ended the mission in April 1980, after more than 16,000 images and four years of weather records.

Outcome

More than 16,000 images, four years of weather and the first frost seen on Mars.

Viking 2

Second Viking lander, which worked in Utopia Planitia from September 1976 to April 1980 and saw the first Martian frost.

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