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None of these missions were successful: Phobos 1 failed en route to Mars, Phobos 2 failed shortly before landing, and Fobos-Grunt never left low Earth orbit.
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- Early Mars Missions
- First Success and More Attempts,1964 - 1971
- Mariner 9 and The Viking Missions, 1971-1980s
- Faster, Better, Cheaper in The 1990s
- The Rover Explosion, 2000 to 2020
- Now on Mars, 2021 to Present
- Additional Resources
- Bibliography
Humanity first attempted to reach Mars near the dawn of the space age. The first satellite, the Soviet Union's Sputnik, launched in 1957; only three years later, the Soviet space program looked to extend its reach to Mars. More formally known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Soviet Union made multiple attempts in the 1960s to ...
NASA's Mariner 4was the first craft to finally reach Mars. The spacecraft launched on Nov. 28, 1964, and was the first to fly by the planet on July 14, 1965. It sent 21 photos of its target back to Earth. Two days after Mariner 4 launched, the Soviet Union tried again with Zond 2. The spacecraft passed by Mars, but its radio failed and it did not r...
The public's image of Mars changed with the arrival of NASA's Mariner 9in November 1971. The spacecraft, which launched on May 30, 1971, arrived at Mars when the entire planet was engulfed in a dust storm. What's more, something mysterious was poking above the plumes of dust. When the debris settled to the surface, scientists discovered those unusu...
NASA's Mars Observer launched on Sept. 25, 1992. Just before it was supposed to achieve Mars orbit on Aug. 21, 1993, the spacecraft was lost. While the communication failure was never fully explained, the most likely cause was a fuel tank rupture that caused the spacecraft to spin out of contact with Earth, according to the 2018 book "Beyond Earth:...
The new millennium was a renaissance in Mars exploration. NASA's Mars Odyssey launched March 7, 2001 and arrived at the Red Planet on Oct. 24, 2001. As of early 2022, the orbiter was still conducting its extended science mission more than two decades later. Mars Odyssey has returned more than a million images, mapped Mars global distributions of se...
The Curiosity rover inspired another, called Perseverance, which landed successfully in Mars' Jezero crater on Feb. 18, 2021. Its quest is foremost to find samples with potential signs of life in them, although it also carries equipment for its numerous other investigations. Perseverance will cache its most promising samples for a future sample-ret...
For more context on early Mars missions and their connection to today, read this article from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on the massive crowdsourced search for the USSR lander Mars 3, more than three decades after its launch and loss. If you want to know more about humanity's fascination for the Red Planet, check out this National Geographic a...
Barnett, Amanda. "In Depth | Mars Climate Orbiter." NASA Solar System Exploration. Planetary Science Communications. Accessed Feb. 22, 2022. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/mars-climate-orbit...NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "Historical Log | Missions." NASA Science Mission Directorate. Accessed Feb. 22, 2022. https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/missions/historical-log."Making a Splash in a Lava Sea." The European Space Agency, Jan. 26, 2022. https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Making_a_splash_in_a_lava_sea.NASA's JPL. "Mariner Program." Mission and Spacecraft Library. Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Accessed Feb. 22, 2022. https://space.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/Programs/mariner.html.Successful Mars flyby (NASA) Launch: November 28, 1964. Mars flyby: July 14, 1965. Mariner 4 was the first spacecraft to fly by Mars and obtain close-up pictures of the Red Planet, passing within 9,844 kilometers (6,117 miles) of Mars. It then took four days to transmit the data back to Earth.
Aug 20, 1975 · The first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars, Viking 1 was part of a two-part mission to investigate the Red Planet and search for signs of life. Viking 1 consisted of both an orbiter and a lander designed to take high-resolution images, and study the Martian surface and atmosphere.
May 20, 2021 · Viking 1 and Viking 2 both landed successfully on Mars, becoming the first two operational landers. The 1980s saw the Soviet Union’s two Phobos missions, both of which failed because of...
Perseverance Is Roving on Mars: This image was taken during the first drive of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars on March 4, 2021. Perseverance landed on Feb. 18, 2021, and the team spent the weeks since then checking out the rover to prepare for surface operations.
Starting in 1960, the Soviet space program launched a series of probes to Mars including the first intended flybys and hard landing . [21] The first successful flyby of Mars was on 14–15 July 1965, by NASA's Mariner 4. [22]
