Mars missions: A brief history
Mars missions: A brief history
Mars missions have been launching from Earth with regularity since the 1960s, bent on exploring our planetary neighbor. With its potential for liquid water — and therefore, life — Mars is an alluring target.
But it's a difficult journey, and only about half of all Mars missions successfully make it to the Red Planet, according to NASA. A "Great Galactic Ghoul" must be consuming them, joked a journalist and a NASA scientist corresponding in 1964, reported the Economist.
Since the first successful flyby in 1965, several space agencies have successfully made it to Mars. NASA, the former Soviet Union space program, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Indian Space Research Organization each met with earlier successes.
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