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misiti3780

I have not been following space exploration in depth so forgive my ignorance on the subject:

1. How long did the trip take ?

2. How many times have "we" (the world) tried and failed?

3. How many times have "we" successfully landed ?

4. Is this "ship" able to return to earth.

Thanks!

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1. About 6 months https://www.google.com/search?q=insight+launch+date&oq=insig...

2. Out of ~50 missions, about 20 have failed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

3. About 8 successful landings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_landing Curiousity was by far the 'coolest' and still astonishes me that we pulled it off. https://youtu.be/h2I8AoB1xgU

4. No.

All true.

To elaborate slightly on (4), Mars 2020, which is scheduled for launch in summer 2020, will have the ability to gather 20 samples into a sample cache, and drop the cache container off, for a possible future return pick-up. So, it's getting closer.

I was just reading an article before the landing that mentioned the number of attempts vs success. I couldn't find it, but found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

1. Six months.

2. This is the fifth success, out of thirteen attempts, over sixty years.

3. There have been five successful landings.

4. No.

There have been more successful landings on Mars:

Viking 1

Viking 2

Mars Pathfinder

Spirit

Opportunity

Phoenix

Curiosity

InSight

And all of the above are JPL projects! The only thing you left off the list is the USSR's Mars landers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_program (Proud JPLer here, although I haven't worked on any Mars stuff.)

Do you still do any occult ceremonies before launching stuff?

Peanuts. (Wait, that's for EDL, not for launch.)

I didn't include the Soviet Mars landers because the most successful of the bunch only worked for 20 seconds on the Mars surface. They had better luck with Venus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry,_descent,_landing...

And I believe all were built by Lockheed Martin?

This is not correct. I believe there have been eight successful Mars landings: Viking 1 and 2, Mars Pathfinder, the two Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity), Phoenix, the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity), and now this one (InSight).

Failures include (going off of a list on Wikipedia) 2MV-3 (Soviet probe that never left Earth orbit; not sure if you want to count this or not since it didn’t fail during landing), Mars 2, Mars 3 (landed successfully but failed within minutes), Mars 6, Mars 7, Mars Polar Lander, Beagle 2 (landed but solar panels failed to deploy), and Schiaparelli.

So I think there have been eight successes and eight failures, if you only count probes intended to land. Notably, all eight successful landers so far have been launched by the United States.

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