Last November, the Mars probe Curiosity began its months-long journey to the red planet.
Russian Mars probe Phobos-Grunt fell into the ocean earlier this month, far short of its goal of reaching the Martian moon Phobos.
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In 1988 Phobos 1, a Soviet Mars probe, was sent a command sequence in which one crucial character was accidentally omitted, causing it to start tumbling in space.
His argument was that the technique, which makes many copies of a piece of DNA, would be so cheap to put on a Mars probe that it would be silly not to.
That number includes the cost of the actual Mars probe and its launch, as well as the cost of the NASA crew handling its journey to Mars for almost a year before it started transmitting.
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It was the first such mission since the failure of the Mars 96 probe, which also failed to reach Mars after a launch failure.
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Nasa's efforts to locate MPL are continuing with cameras on board the orbiting probe Mars Global Surveyor scanning the planet's surface.
The cost of the Mars Global Surveyor probe was roughly 200 million USD for the satellite and launch, plus 20 million per year.
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Personally I think that the bouncing ball approach should be the standard way to land a small unmanned probe on Mars.
Last Wednesday, India celebrated the 65th anniversary of its independence, and officials announced that it would send a space probe to Mars.
And on Wednesday, they have another mission scheduled to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center that's going to send a probe to Mars.
Yet this is a race, and whoever is the first to fulfill various objectives, such as being the first to send a man into orbit or a probe to Mars, garners more prestige.
Now, using a camera onboard an orbiting probe called Mars Global Surveyor, scientists think they may have spotted something on the surface of Mars that is a good candidate for the remains of this NASA craft.
So it was to everybody's disappointment that Mariner 4, the first space probe to fly past Mars (in 1965), revealed a place with a surface that appeared to have been static for billions of years.
Nonetheless, Mr O'Keefe and Mr Koptev have given the green light to a programme to build a US-Russian space probe for the exploration of Mars.
In 1969, the U.S. space probe "Mariner Seven" flew by Mars, sending back photographs and scientific data.
The most recent Russian probe, which was launched to the Mars moon Phobos last November, never made it out of Earth orbit.
The probe was built to land on the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, and scoop up rock to bring back to Earth.
Nasa also said it was considering sending a second landing probe at the same time to explore a different area of Mars.
Based on the Phoenix lander, the craft is tasked with giving us a peek beneath the planet's surface, armed with tools that include a geodetic instrument from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will be used to calculate Mars' rotation axis, a seismic wave sensor and a subsurface heat probe, to measure the planet's internal temperature.
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The probe malfunctioned when it reached orbit and failed to launch its boosters to take it to Mars.
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In 1971, the American space probe "Mariner Nine" blasted off from Cape Kennedy, Florida, on a journey to Mars.
The Mars Global Surveyor, which mapped the Red Planet from the late 90s, and the Near-Shoemaker probe, which visited an Asteroid Eros in 2003, both carried the Westcott technology.
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