August 20 · This Day in America
A Titan-Centaur rocket thunders off a Cape Canaveral pad carrying the boldest question NASA has ever asked of another world: is anyone there? Viking 1 is an orbiter and a lander, the lander packed with a tiny automated biology laboratory built to scoop Martian soil and test it for the chemistry of life. The journey takes nearly a year. On July 20, 1976 — seven years to the day after Apollo 11 — the lander settles onto the rust-colored plain of Chryse Planitia and sends home the first photograph ever taken from the surface of Mars: sharp rocks, pink sky, a horizon no human eye had seen. It runs for more than six years. The life experiments come back ambiguous, argued over to this day. But for the first time, a machine built by human hands stood on Mars and looked around, and we got to look with it.
Source: science.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1794
Near the Maumee River in Ohio, in a tangle of trees flattened by an old tornado, General Anthony Wayne's army meets the warriors of a Native confederacy — Shawnee, Miami, and more — defending their homeland. The fight lasts barely over an hour. The confederacy scatters; the British fort nearby keeps its gates shut. The Battle of Fallen Timbers ends the Northwest Indian War and forces the treaty that pries open Ohio to American settlement. A continent's future turned in a single bloody hour in the woods.
Source: www.britannica.com