Incredible Montage of NASA's Exploration of Mars for 50 years

Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech - Humans have been visiting and exploring Mars for more than half a century, and NASA has released a video celebrating the agency's remarkable contributions. It seems hard to believe, but since the 1960's humans have been sending spacecraft to Mars. The earliest pioneers were the robotic vehicles of the Soviet Union in 1960 and 1962 - but these faced a host of teething problems, from launch failures to communication failures en route to the red planet.

In 1964 NASA's Mariner 4 became humanity's first successful mission to Mars, returning images that immediately laid to rest most of our speculations about this world being any kind of Earth-analog. Mars was dry, dusty, well-cratered, and very alien.

Recently NASA posted the following video montage of all (successful) Mars missions the agency has undertaken, as well as a glimpse to the future. It's naturally rather self-congratulatory, but hey, if you can explore another world with this degree of skill I think you're allowed a little bit of celebration. And in this era of political uncertainty it doesn't hurt to remind us all of what you can do for a tiny fraction of the US GDP.

The continuous exploration began on July 4, 1997, when NASA’s Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars. Since this date, there has always been at least one active mission exploring the planet either from the ground or from orbit.

Pathfinder remained operational for only a little over three months, but it was crucial to the future of Martian rovers.

"Without Mars Pathfinder, there could not have been Spirit and Opportunity, and without Spirit and Opportunity, there could not have been Curiosity," Pathfinder Project Scientist Matt Golombek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, said.

Spirit and Opportunity were the next missions to explore the surface of Mars with both arriving on the planet in January of 2004.

The twin rovers explored different parts of the planet, but both had the same goal of finding evidence that liquid water was once present on Mars.

“Both rovers have found evidence of ancient Martian environments where intermittently wet and habitable conditions existed,” NASA said.

Contact with Spirit was lost on March 22, 2010, but Opportunity is still operational and driving around the Martian surface to this day.

A small, immobile probe called the Phoenix Lander also conducted research near Mars’ north pole between May 28, 2008, and Nov. 2, 2008, before contact was lost. This mission helped NASA understand the polar regions of the planet, an area that had previously been unexplored.

The journey to Mars continues with additional robotic missions planned for 2016 and 2020, and human missions in the 2030s.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/details.php?id=1395

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