Lost in space: The British-bulit Beagle 2 was the most recent Mars probe to fail.
Credit: ESA
A chronology of international missions to Mars.
• 1960 to 64: The USSR fails at six tries to send probes to Mars, and the United States' first try, in November 1964, also fails.
• Nov 28, 1964: The U.S. probe Mariner 4 starts an eight-month journey to Mars, collecting the first close-up pictures of another planet in a July 1965 flyby.
• Nov 30, 1964: The USSR's Zond gets close to Mars in a flyby but does not send back any data.
• Feb to Mar 1969: The U.S. launches Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 carrying sensors to analyse the Martian atmosphere and surface, and they send back nearly 200 pictures of the northern and southern polar caps and the moon Phobos.
• May 31, 1971: Mariner 9 launches to become the first successful orbiter of Mars, photomapping all of the planet's surface and taking close-up images of Phobos and Deimos, Mars' second moon.
• May 1971: The USSR launches twin orbit vehicles Mars 2 and 3, both carrying surface rovers. The two successfully went into orbit but both rovers fail. Two more landers fail in March 1974.
• July to Sept 1976: The U.S. successfully places two landers on the surface from the Viking 1 and 2 orbiters launched a year earlier. The Viking 2 lander's biology experiments fail to find evidence of life, but reveal surprising chemical activity in the Martian soil.
• Sept 11, 1997: The U.S. Mars Global Surveyor goes into orbit around Mars, and over nine years tracks changes in the planet's surface including evidence of modern water flows and seasonal shifts.
• July 4, 1997: The U.S. Mars Pathfinder parachutes onto the rocky Ares Vallis region of Mars, its landing cushioned by airbags. The lander and rover return more than 17,000 images and extensive data on soil and rock composition and wind and other weather factors. The data suggests Mars was formerly warm and wet, with a more dense atmosphere and liquid water.
• July 4, 1998: Japan enters the Mars exploration race, but its Nozomi probe never reaches Mars's orbit.
• April 7, 2001: The U.S. Mars Odyssey orbiter is launched to carry out experiments on Mars's geology and climate, aiding the search for evidence of water and life.
• June 2, 2003: European Space Agency launches Mars Express, carrying the British-built Beagle 2 lander. The lander loses contact upon separating from the orbiter in Dec 2003, its fate unknown.
• Jan 2004: The U.S. places two more rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, on opposite sides of the Mars surface and they begin extensive geological analysis of the surface.
• Jan 14, 2004: U.S. President George W. Bush announces a new NASA initiative to eventually send humans to Mars via a moon base after 2020.
• Feb 25, 2007: European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft performs a risky low-altitude flyby of Mars.
• Jan 2008: Lev Zelyony, director of Russia's Space Research Institute, says it could land a Russian on the Red Planet by 2025.
• May 2008: NASA's Phoenix probe lands safely in the northern polar region of Mars.
