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Here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by Mars in the late 1970's.

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If there are Martians, we bet they're huge into disco.

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As described in the passage, when did the first NASA mission actually land on Mars?

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The dates we have to choose from here are all pretty close together, so we're going

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to head back to the passage to make sure we have them straight in our heads.

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Do or die, we're going to figure out when NASA first managed to land something on Mars.

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(C) claims this happened in 1965, but we weren't born yesterday.

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Though line 10 tells us that the Mariner 4 sent the first pictures of Mars, it doesn't

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say anything about the spacecraft actually landing on the red planet.

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Sounds like NASA was pulling off the equivalent of drive-by photography. How very touristy of them.

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We can eliminate choice (C). Answer (A) is super tempting.

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If we aren't careful when skimming back through the passage, we might be tricked by

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line 18, which tells us that Vikings 1 and 2 were launched in 1975.

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If we dig deeper into the passage, however, we find choice (B), 1976, is actually the

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correct answer.

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Though Vikings 1 and 2 were launched in 1975, it took them a year to make it to Mars.

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Wow, a year in space. Must've gotten pretty boring...

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