Named for the Roman god of war, Mars is not very kind to visitors

Mars has the unfortunate habit of respecting its mythological name and defeating the Earth when it comes to accepting visitors.

NASA's InSight is the latest spacecraft to call, with the firm intention of landing and digging deeper into the planet than anything that has been done before. The lander arrives on Mars Monday after a six-month trip.

"We have had several successful landings now, but you never know what Mars will launch," said Rob Grover, chief engineer of the jet propulsion laboratory's landing team. NASA.

Landing on Mars is always risky, say Grover and other experts at every opportunity.

"Our job with the landing team is to be paranoid about what might go wrong and make sure we're doing everything we can to make sure things are going well," he said. he declared.

The numbers support it. Only about 40% of all missions on Mars – named after the Roman god of war – have succeeded.

"Going to Mars is really very difficult," Thomas Zurbuchen, senior scientist at NASA, told reporters earlier this week. "As humanity, explorers around the world, we hit about 50% – or less."

The United States is the only country to successfully operate a spacecraft on the Martian surface. InSight represents the ninth attempt by NASA to install a spacecraft on Mars; a single effort has failed.

The last – the NASA Curiosity rover – is still in motion after six years, with more than 20 kilometers on the clock. The older, smaller, and smaller space agency opportunity wandered there until June, when a global dust storm put it out of action. The flight controllers have not yet lost hope that it will be revived.

The story of humanity, which has been going on for nearly 60 years, consists of flying over the red planet to take photographs all the time, as well as much more complicated efforts to put spacecraft in orbit around the red planet and to land. .

NASA's Mariner 4 made the first successful flyby of the red planet in 1965, returning 21 photos.

Mariner 9's went into orbit around Mars and sent back more than 7,000 photos.

And NASA's Vikings 1 and 2 not only put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars in 1976, but also to the surface. The twin Vikings were the first successful landing on Mars from planet Earth.

The 1990s were not as kind to NASA. The observer Mars was sentenced to death by a humiliating English-metric conversion in 1993. Another American orbiter was then lost, along with a lander and two accompanying probes intended to penetrate to the surface.

Despite decades of testing, Russia, in particular, had a lousy chance on Mars.

The Soviet Union at the time was the first to attempt an overflight of Mars, in 1960. The probe never reached the Earth's orbit. After more launching failures and flight incidents, the Soviets finally put into orbit a pair of spacecraft in 1971 and retrieved real data. But the companions of landing were a total bust.

The Soviets / Russians thus lost their most recent attempt with China in 2011. The dreaded goal was to land on the Phobos Moon, a space probe, to collect and retrieve samples and place a second probe in orbit around Mars. Neither one nor the other came out of Earth 's orbit.

Europe was also stung on Mars, as was Japan.

Although the European Space Agency has satellites operating around Mars, both of its landing attempts have failed. Just two years ago, his lander touched the surface so quickly that he dug a crater. The only Japanese spacecraft, launched in 1998, has not been put into orbit.

India, meanwhile, has been operating a satellite around Mars for four years, its first and only shot on the red planet.

There is a strong European presence on NASA's InSight. Germany is responsible for the mechanical mole designed to dig 5 meters (16 feet) into the Martian surface in order to take underground heat measurements, while France runs the seismometer earthquake monitoring of the LG .

On the surface, Curiosity is the only thing that works on Mars. Currently in Orbit: American Odyssey since 2001, Mars Express in Europe (2003), American Orbiter Mars Reconnaissance (2006), United States Maven (2014), Indian Orbiter of Mangalyaan (2014) and Orbiter of Gas Traces in Europe (2016) .

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For full coverage of AP's Mars landing: https://apnews.com/MarsLanding

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