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 ...

Need to send a rover to Mars? Stop by a Soviet nuclear weapons plant to borrow a cup of plutonium. By Geoffrey Brumfiel. Aug 20, 2012 7:15 AM. A panorama taken by the Curiosity rover on Mars.

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 ...