Missions To Mars - All Of Them (graphic)

[bananas]

http://nasawatch.com/archives/2009/10/missions-to-mar.html

Missions To Mars - All Of Them
By Keith Cowing on October 21, 2009 10:58 PM 3 Comments


Infographic of the Day: We're Getting Good at Going to Mars, Fast Company

"Maybe ever since the Moon landing, it's been pretty easy to overestimate the success of our space programs--when we want to go somewhere or launch something, we just do it, right? In actuality, space exploration remains a high risk endeavor, as the various Space Shuttle disasters have proven. And going to Mars? Maybe it's out closest planet, but going there isn't as easy as it seems. To prove it, here's a clever graph of all the missions ever sent to Mars. As you can see, it's basically a bar graph; missions to Mars as listed chronologically, and the mission result is coded by how close the corresponding bar reaches to Mars."

The full-size image is 443K, you have to follow 4 or 5 links to get to it.

[comtec]

1. kewl

very interesting

[Greyskye]

2. Here's the link to the big pic:

http://i.imgur.com/GoCGR.jpg

It was a pain to get to. I'm posting this as text so that the
link won't auto-load.

[pokerfan]

3. The Mars Climate Orbiter

was a casualty of our failure to adopt the metric system. :banghead:

[joshcryer]

6. The official cause was mismanagement more than anything else.

Inter-office groups simply failed to communicate properly. Yeah, if everyone used metric it would've been OK, but if everyone used Imperial it would've been OK too.

[krispos42]

4. Here's the pic

Man, I had no idea the USSR had such a problem getting there!

[joshcryer]

5. Yeah, it skews the stats badly, the US only failed twice. It looks like an ever reaching hand!

[krispos42]

7. I count 5 failues

Mariner 3, Mariner 8, Mars Observer, Mars Climate Orbiter, and Mars Polar Lander/Deep Space 2.


14 for the Russians. Ugh.

[joshcryer]

8. Ahh, I meant since the Vikings, but I forgot about Observer.

That graphic is pretty difficult to read because the failures look similar to the flybys.