50 years of Viking 1 landing: our PI reflects on how our view of Mars has changed!
Image Credit: NASA/JPL.
What has Mars taught us in 50 years?
Fifty years ago, on 20 July 1976, NASA's Viking 1 made the first successful landing on Mars and our relationship with the Red Planet was never the same. To mark the anniversary, PI Merve Yeşilbaş was interviewed by Rebecca Forsberg for Populär Astronomi, Sweden's leading popular astronomy magazine, in a feature tracing how our image of Mars has transformed from imaginary canals to today's rovers. 🪐
In the piece, Merve walks through the shift from thinking of Mars as a cold, dry, rusty planet to understanding it as a world with a much wetter past, which is a change driven above all by the discovery of hydrated minerals, the chemical fingerprints of ancient water. As she puts it, minerals act like time capsules: by understanding the conditions under which they formed, we can read Mars's climate, chemistry, and habitability across time. 🔬
Perhaps the most striking part is the lesson Viking itself taught us. Merve explains how samples once dismissed as Earthly contamination turned out to be the breakdown products of genuine Martian organic molecules. Viking had detected organics all along; we simply hadn't understood Mars's chemistry well enough to realize it. It's a powerful reminder of how science advances not just through answers, but through learning to ask better questions.
The feature also highlights the shift in strategy that guides our lab today: instead of asking a simple yes-or-no about life, we now work patiently to understand the planet's chemistry, habitability, and how any traces of life might be preserved. Wonderful to see the postdoc Alef dos Santos and student Frida Folkesson’s photo featured alongside Merve in the article too! 🚀
A warm thank you to Rebecca Forsberg and Populär Astronomi for such a thoughtful piece!
This is from our PI’s special note: Happy landing anniversary, Viking 1! Fifty years down, and the best is still waiting beneath the Martian surface! 🚀 🛸