I was recently looking over the list of all unmanned Mars probes, those that failed and those that worked. This is the one that has triggered the much quoted "2/3 of all Mars missions have failed" statistic, had some talk about a Galatic Ghoul out near Mars and led to one of the MER scientists describing Mars as the "Death Planet". However, when you look at the list you notice that Mars is actually only a Death Planet for Soviet/Russian probes, for American probes it's record is actually quite good.

Effectively 100% of Soviet/Russian mars missions have failed. The Soviet Union/Russia has sent the most probes to Mars of any nation (16 vs 14 for the U.S. prior to MER-A and MER-B) and so it's 100% failure rate skews the numbers very badly. The only Russian probes to Mars that were not complete failures were Mars 5 launched in 1973 that failed after a few days in martian orbit and Mars 6 that failed minutes after landing on Mars.

The U.S. record with Mars missions on the other hand has been quite good (much better than the 100% failure rate of their Ranger Lunar probes prior to Ranger 7 for example). Out of 14 U.S. Mars missions since Mariner 3 in 1964 (excluding MER-A and MER-B) they've only had 5 failures. That's a failure rate of a little over 1/3, nowhere close to the oft quoted 2/3 figure that's be given so much publicity recently. What really hurt them in the public eye (and short memory) was losing both MCO in '98 and MPL in '99--these back to back failures made everyone forget the many successes that had preceeded them).

Japan has of course a 100% failure rate too but with only one Mars probe launched that's not very useful statistically and Europe has had either one or two probes depending on how you look at Mars Express vs Beagle 2--1 mission or two, Europe and the UK or both European?

The bottom line is obvious--if you want to go to Mars go with the Americans, then you'll have a 2/3 chance of making it!

N.B. I'm not an American. :-)

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David S.

"Why are the pretty ones always insane?"
-- Chief Clancy Wiggum, The Simpsons.