First colour Mars shots

Press, 22 July 1976, Page 8

First colour Mars shots

NZPA-Reuter Pasadena, California

The Viking I landing craft on Mars will send back to earth , this morning man’s first colour photographs from the surface of the red planet.

For 19 hours after a flawless soft landing and its transmission of two razorsharp black-and-white pictures, Viking’s bug-like lander was out of contact.

“It is sleeping through the long Martian night,” said a spokesman for the United States Jet-Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

The three-legged craft is sitting on smooth Martian lowland in the planet’s northern hemisphere. It will transmit three pictures of Martian landscape, each taken through different colour filters. The pictures will be married by computers, and the first groundlevel colour photographs of Mars should appear on screens in Pasadena early this morning. The pictures and other data will be sent to Earth

both directly and through the parent Viking spacecraft now orbiting Mars. Dr Carl Sagan, a Cornell University astronomer who has been one of the scientists most optimistic about the possibility of finding life on Mars, told a press conference about the first pictures:

“There are no features which have to be due to life, no obvious bushes or trees or anybody out. But it does not exclude many other possibilities, including microbes in the sand. It does not exclude the possibility of even larger organisms elsew’here on the planet." The first panorama taken j from the spacecraft showed a rocky terrain splotched with occasional light sand dunes rolling out to the horizon about three or four kilometres away. Hills on the horizon appeared to be the edges of craters. Thin drifts of soil lay on the surface, and were kicked up by the lander’s braking rockets.' But in general the surface appeared hard.