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The sign accompanying the lander. It reads

Voyage of the Vikings

Viking was an ambitious effort to solve basic riddles about the red planet. The most basic of all: is there life? In front of you is a full-scale engineering model of the Viking Lander that was designed to answer this question.

In the summer of 1976, two Viking Landers became the first vehicles in history to land successfully on Mars. On board each was a miniature laboratory that tested the martial soil for signs of life. No conclusive signs were found.

Strictly speaking, the Viking landers were the second and third vehicles to land successfully on Mars; the Soviet Mars 3 lander soft-landed on Mars on December 2, 1971, but ceased functioning after 14.5 seconds.