"The Viking team didn't know the Martian atmosphere very well, we had almost no idea about the terrain or the rocks, and yet we had the temerity to try to soft land on the surface," recalled Gentry Lee, Solar System Exploration chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Lee was the science analysis and mission planning director for the Viking mission.
The original plan, surprisingly enough, was to land in Cydonia, site of the "Face," "pyramids" and other intriguing features. Although the decision to land in Chryse and Utopia was ostensibly for safety reasons, the failure of further probes (such as the MERs) to land in Cydonia is somewhat difficult to fathom, given our increased understanding of the Martian surface.
Was the Viking team somehow directed away from the Cydonia region (then, as now, a candidate site for extraterrestrial artifacts)?
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