Mars Missions Failure Report Assortment: Review and Conspectus

TL;DR

This paper reviews Mars mission failures, analyzing 44 attempts to identify common errors, failure rates, and patterns across countries, spacecraft types, and launch vehicles, providing a comprehensive overview of past setbacks in Mars exploration.

Contribution

It offers a detailed analysis of Mars mission failure records, including statistical and graphical insights, which is a novel comprehensive review of global Mars mission setbacks.

Findings

Failure rate of 59% among Mars missions

Common errors identified in mission sequences

Significant variation in failure rates across countries and spacecraft types

Abstract

Mars has been successfully explored by various space firms. Globally, 44 mission attempts were made, lamentably 26 encountered setbacks. There have been instances where a trivial error in the progressive accomplishment of spaceflight sequence might prompt in an extreme loss. Hence in this paper, we have investigated several failure records and investigation reports of spacecraft attempted towards Mars. The report comprises a precise and summarized report assessed from various adequate online resources as well as published research articles. Analyzing records, spaceflight sequence charts, and mission targets achieved were technically tabularized beginning from launch to the Mars landing. Additionally, we have estimated approximate mission duration, the rate of failure, and their proportions and were graphically portrayed. Further, we have generated graphical representations of the number of spacecraft launches concerning the country, type of spacecraft, and launch vehicles.