Many people don’t know that the Soviet Union sent two Mars landers hurtling toward the "red planet" before anyone else. One of them made it. Almost.

The Prop M rover. via NASA . Before Curiosity took selfies and Opportunity rolled a marathon, rovers on Mars were more modest. Sojourner, NASA's first rover, was a microwave-sized robot designed to ...

The Soviet Union was the only other country to land a rover on the moon and Mars. In the spirit of friendly competition, we've ranked the 13 rovers on how far they've traveled on the moon and Mars ...

Shortly after the Soviet Union plopped its first robotic rover on the moon in 1970, NASA envisioned a Mars rover for the to launch in 1979. Space historian and Beyond Apollo blogger David Portree ...

Sojourner may have been the first rover to rove on Mars, but a quarter of a century earlier, the Soviet Union sent the very first rovers to the Red Planet as part of the Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions.

Mars 3 accomplished the first soft landing on Mars. Then it died. It carried aboard it a rover, Prop-M, that would have been the first on another planet.

China’s Zhurong Mars rover is about to start exploring the Red Planet. ... Space historians cite both the U.S. and the Soviet Union as the only two countries to softly land spacecraft on Mars.

Over 25 years, remotely controlled rovers have uncovered Mars’ watery history and continue to search for evidence that life once existed there.

There are also several inactive spacecraft on Mars' surface, which ran out of power or were broken in some way. One example is the NASA Pathfinder lander and Sojourner rover, which landed in July ...

Anthropologists call for tracking and preservation of human artifacts on Mars. University of Kansas. Journal Nature Astronomy DOI 10.1038/s41550-024-02439-w ...