Here’s every place we’ve landed or crashed robots on Mars
The Mars 2020 Rover should find its way to the Red Planet in 2020.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Both NASA and the Chinese space agency hope to launch new rovers for Mars in the coming weeks. If they do, they will be the 9th and 10th ships to successfully land on the surface of our planetary neighbor.
Hopefully not NASA’s Perseverance Rover China’s Tianwen-1 rover is also not the next machine to end its mission abruptly with a crash landing on Mars. At least two vehicles crashed, while four others lost contact with Earth shortly before or after landing.
On the occasion of the upcoming Mars launch season, which only takes place when the planets are best aligned for travel every 26 months, the Planetary Society has compiled the following map of all 17 past and future Mars landing attempts until the planned landing in 2023 European rover and Russian lander.
Planetary society
Interestingly, all eight successful Mars landings were NASA missions, although the US space agency also had its own failure when the Mars Polar Lander was lost in 1999.
As the map shows, Perseverance will land relatively close to the area where Beagle 2 of the European Space Agency was last seen. After the separation, ESA lost contact with the country and abruptly ended its mission, although it was later found that it had landed successfully.
The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla put the map together with the handy infographic below More information about some landings can be found here.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover is scheduled to launch on July 17 and land in Jezero Crater on February 18.
Planetary society
