As on date, we have sent 82 spacecraft to Mars spanning over 49 missions. But almost 60 per cent of them ended in failure (or partial failure), sometimes before they could even start collecting useful data. In fact, our first attempt itself ended in a launch failure in 1960; the Soviet Union’s (present-day Russia) Mars 1M No.1 spacecraft, was destroyed after it suffered an equipment malfunction at an altitude of 120 kilometres above the Earth.
Over the first three launch windows (in 1960, 1962 and 1964), we suffered six losses before NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft became the first successful mission to Mars after completing a flyby of the planet on 15 July, 1965. But we have had unexpected successes also! NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), called Spirit and Opportunity, launched separately in 2003, functioned much beyond their planned durations of operation (90 sols) by over 24 and 57 times! By the time we lost contact with them in 2010 and 2018, respectively, they had collected a wealth of data that are invaluable to our understanding of Mars.
As with everything else, every time a mission to Mars fails, we must let Thomas Edison’s words guide us – “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 things that do not work!”
Picture Credit : Google
