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The Viking landers were the first attempt by the US to land on Mars. The Soviets actually soft-landed first on their second try but the lander failed after transmitting one corrupted image. There were certainly many failed Mars missions by various countries, but the Vikings at least got it right on the first go.

NASA’s first attempt to land on Mars was successful. I count 11 total attempts with one failure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

Yeah, this is a remarkably good score - for comparison Europe is at 0 out of 2. :P

The first one [1] actually landed but failed to send back any data (kinda like the soviet example) due to deployment failure.

But the second one will at least have an impact on future generations, with people being confused why there are two Shiaparelli[2] craters on Mars. ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiaparelli_EDM

The rocket booster landing of mars rover also hasn’t been tried before.