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Missions To Mars Have Had A High Failure Rate Historically [Infographic]

This article is more than 5 years old.

NASA's Mars InSight probe finally made it to the red planet after a 300-million-mile journey lasting seven months. The spacecraft slammed into the Martian atmosphere at 12,300mph yesterday before settling on the Elysium Planitia, an extensive lava plain near the equator. The $814 million lander will use a sophisticated array of onboard instruments to study Mars' core, crust and mantle to help scientists learn more about how the planet was formed. 

As with all previous unmanned missions to Mars, the InSight's landing was extremely tense for everyone in mission control. NASA described the landing as "seven minutes of terror" and cheers erupted when confirmation finally came through that the probe had survived its perilous descent. Given the price and amount of work put into the endeavor, all of that trepidation is understandable given the high failure rate of previous missions to Mars. Whether its landing a probe on the Martian surface, orbiting the planet or merely conducting a flyby, only 40% of previous trips have proven successful.

The following infographic uses a historical log maintained by NASA to show the number of successful and unsuccessful Mars missions undertaken by different countries between 1960 and 2018. The first five missions were all undertaken by the USSR in the early 1960s and all of them failed for a variety of reasons such as radio failure or the craft breaking apart. The U.S. had its first success when Mariner 4 conducted a flyby in 1964, returning 21 images. Since then, NASA has enjoyed considerable success with 16 missions succeeding out of 22. On the other hand, the USSR/Russia has seen 15 out of its 18 missions end in failure.

Since the turn of the century, 12 missions have been undertaken and only one of them ended in outright failure. That improvement will certainly give NASA and other space agencies/organizations hope that a human mission can be attempted at some stage in the future with a high chance of success. 

*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)

Statista