We are pretty good at landing on Mars now, but there was no guarantee that Viking 1 would be lucky. Carl Sagan said (as the spacecraft was approaching Mars) "We are fantastically ignorant of factors that could be fatal to a successful landing." Even with the Viking Orbiter images this was true. At 40 m/pixel not a single boulder could be seen in any image. And yet... they succeeded. Tim Mutch (Brown University) was the leader of the imaging team...
#mars #viking