Opportunity and Curiosity are both going strong, roving on the surface. MAVEN, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and more probes are still in orbit. With so many successful missions to Mars, it's easy to forget that getting there has never been easy. In fact, more missions have failed than not: 28 flops compared to 19 successes.
NASA has had its share of Mars messes, particularly in 1990s when four out of six missions failed. But the agency's troubles are nothing compared with how difficult Russia has found it to go to Mars. Space is hard. Here, we present a short history of Mars fails:
Russia
Buoyed by the success of Sputnik, the Soviet Union tried to send probes to Mars just a few years after it got a satellite in orbit around Earth. The plan began with Mars 1M in 1960, intended as a flyby. The problem was, it never left Earth. The first attempt lifted off just fine, but during the second stage the attitude control system rattled loose, dooming the third stage, which broke up over Siberia.
The second launch, Mars 1M No. 2, never reached orbit because a liquid oxygen leak froze up the second stage fuel supply. Sputnik 22 reached Earth orbit in 1962, but burned up there when its third stage exploded. Sputnik 24 also reached orbit but failed due to a fuel line problems in 1962. Sputnik 23 made it to Mars in 1963, but months after communication with the craft was lost, the same fate as the Zond 2 in 1964. Mars 1969A exploded during its third stage burn, throwing debris over the Altai Mountains. Mars 1969B failed big on the launch pad, reaching only 330 feet before turning around and crashing near Baikonur. Kosmos 419 burned up in low earth orbit in 1971.
It was a struggle.
Later that year, the USSR had something of a success when Mars 2 entered the Red Planet's orbit in November 1971. The craft carried with it a lander and rover, which crash landed to the ground on Mars, and contact was lost. A similar fate befell Mars 3 in December 1971. The lander reached the ground but shut down just moments later. Mars 4 through Mars 7 were all failures. After the 1973 failure of Mars 7, the Soviet space agency didn't attempt another Mars mission until 1988, when it launched two missions to the moon Phobos. They failed. The Fobos-Grunt lander attempted to carry on the work when it was launched in 2011, but it never left Earth orbit.
What went so wrong? Well, there's a lot to unpack there. While NASA has been relatively judicious in its launches, the Soviet space agency threw probe after probe at the planets, hoping some would stick. It was very successful at getting probes to Venus. But the Soviets were virtually unable to get a probe to Mars or keep it there. The Russian space agency longed to be first, whether to Mars, Venus, or the Moon. But it quashed knowledge of the failures, many not coming to light until much later. (It took the agency two years to admit the cause of death of the cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 11: cabin depressurization, causing the only in-space deaths to date.)
Just check out a clips reel of rocket launch failures:
Aside from Fobos-Grunt, Russia has attempted only one other Mars mission in the post-Soviet era. Mars 96 launched in 1996 carrying one of the heftiest Mars payloads ever attempted—including an orbiter, a lander, and several penetrators working in sync to build a comprehensive picture of Mars. It could have been a hell of a mission. But Mars 96 failed to enter Earth orbit, instead rocketing back down into the atmosphere. The rocket broke up and spread plutonium-238 ... somewhere. The Russians have never quite admitted where.
NASA
The Mariner program was NASA's attempt in the 1960s to visit the nearest worlds, Venus and Mars. NASA failed on its first go-round to Mars in 1964, when Mariner 3 failed to deploy its solar panels and its battery died. Mariner 4 succeeded in its flyby, however, giving us our first inkling that Mars wasn't a wet, warm mini-Earth but a cold and desolate desert. Mariners 6 and 7 reached Mars, too, though 8 flopped, burning up in the Earth's atmosphere. Instead, Mariner 9 became NASA's first Mars orbiter, though Russia's Mars 2 and 3 orbited the world first.
In the 1970s, NASA continued its good luck streak with both Viking missions making it to Mars, including a lander component for each. But the agency's luck ran out in 1992, when Mars Observer got to Mars' doorstep before abruptly severing communication. A ruptured fuel tank likely caused the system to spin, fried much of the electrical system, and left the craft unable to execute its automated commands.
While the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Pathfinder missions (including the first NASA rover) were successes, two other missions were not. NASA attempted to insert the Mars Climate Orbiter into orbit in 1999. Instead, a software programming error led to the wrong measuring units being used, bringing the orbiter low enough into the atmosphere that it broke up and burned up. The Mars Polar Lander and a payload of two impactors were destroyed later that year, too, as the lander failed to fire correctly during descent.
What went wrong? At the time of Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, NASA admin Daniel Goldin was pushing for "faster, cheaper, better" missions, which largely phased out large missions with sprawling budgets in favor of smaller Discovery-class missions. In time, that approach led to some of today's extremely successful NASA missions, including the Kepler exoplanet hunter, the Dawn probe presently visiting the Asteroid Belt, and the MESSENGER mission that captured beautiful images of Mercury. But back then, the Mars mission failures were blamed on this approach. After those failures, Michael Lemonick at CNN wrote: "After years of tipping the other way, 'better' may finally be getting the same attention as 'faster' and 'cheaper' in NASA's mindset." Goldin admitted some fault, telling Newshour, "I pushed too hard, and in doing so stretched the system too thin."
Things have certainly turned around since then. NASA has had a series of high-profile successes on Mars: The Phoenix Lander, the MAVEN orbiter, the plucky and long-lived Opportunity bot (and its departed but still tenacious cousin, Spirit) and, of course, Curiosity.
Other agencies
Earlier this year, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made a big discovery: It found the long-lost Beagle-2 probe. Part of the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission, the craft was to land on Mars on Christmas 2003. But the failure of two solar panels to deploy meant that the communications system couldn't deploy either, leaving the craft unable to communicate back with Earth. (Mars Express's orbiter was a success.)
China's ambitions for exploring Mars took a hit in 2011, when Yinghua-1 failed in the same launch that caused the failure of Fobos-Grunt. To date, it remains China's only attempt to reach Mars. Japan, meanwhile, launched the Nozomi spacecraft to Mars in1998, and made it to the Red Planet in 2003. But Japan's first attempt at a Mars probe suffered an electrical system failure and it never reached Martian orbit. The likely cause was a massive solar flare that hit the probe in 2002.
The Indian Space Research Organisation has sent exactly one mission to Mars, and thus has a rare feat for any space agency: a 100 percent success rate. The Mangalyaan craft launched in November 2013 and entered orbit 10 months later. A follow-up mission is slated for 2018; hopefully it keeps the success going for the ISRO.
The Numbers Game
If it seems like there's a high rate of failure of Mars missions, it speaks less to a "Mars curse," and more to the sheer volume of missions sent to the planet. Missions fail. There have been 40 missions sent to Venus; 18 of those did not succeed. More than 50 missions to the Moon have failed, including Apollo 13. Mars is no different.
Space travel is hard. Getting to Mars isn't as easy as it seems, and having a mission succeed is just as hard. Minor setbacks haven't discouraged space agencies, nor have the major ones. If anything, it pushes them to correct on their last mistakes and drives them to try harder the second time.
