Mars Exploration Hub

Humanity's quest to explore Mars stretches back over half a century. In 1965, NASA's Mariner 4 became the first spacecraft to successfully fly by the Red Planet, returning 22 grainy images that revealed a barren, cratered world. The Viking program marked the next great leap: Viking 1 and Viking 2 landed on Mars in 1976, conducting the first soil experiments designed to detect signs of life. While the biology results were inconclusive, the Vikings transmitted thousands of images and weather reports that transformed our understanding of Mars.

After a quiet period, Mars exploration surged in the late 1990s. NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997 deployed the first rover, Sojourner, a microwave-oven-sized vehicle that demonstrated mobile science on another planet. The twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, arrived in January 2004. Spirit explored the Columbia Hills region for over six years, uncovering evidence of past volcanic activity and water. Opportunity became a record-breaking marathon runner, traveling more than 45 kilometers over nearly 15 years before a planet-encircling dust storm ended its mission in 2018.

Today, two advanced rovers continue the work. Curiosity, a car-sized laboratory on wheels, has been climbing Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater since August 2012, drilling into rocks to study Mars's ancient habitable environments. Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater in February 2021 with the most sophisticated scientific instruments ever sent to Mars. It carries the Ingenuity helicopter -- the first aircraft to fly on another world -- and is caching rock samples that a future mission will retrieve and return to Earth for detailed laboratory analysis. Together, these missions are laying the groundwork for human exploration of Mars within the coming decades.