NASA nervous as Phoenix set to land on Mars

Yep, we have a 50/50 chance of success. Hopefully the adjustment burns coming up go ok and we have a good landing. My fingers are crossed.
 
Half of ALL missions have succeeded, but NASA has launched six LANDING missions prior to this one, and five have succeeded. If we include Beagle II, then it's still five out of seven. Has Russia/USSR ever tried to put a lander on Mars?
 
This one is probably my favorite:

Cosmos 419 (Launch Vehicle: Proton Booster Plus Upper Stage and Escape Stages) (Soviet) May 10, 1971- Cosmos 419 was an attempted Mars orbiter or possibly an orbiter/lander combination. The spacecraft and the Block D fourth stage were successfully launched into Earth orbit. The timer was supposed to ignite the stage 1.5 hours after launch, but had been erroneously set for 1.5 years. The spacecraft re-entered 2 days later on May 12, 1971.
 
Missioncmdr said:
This one is probably my favorite:

Cosmos 419 (Launch Vehicle: Proton Booster Plus Upper Stage and Escape Stages) (Soviet) May 10, 1971- Cosmos 419 was an attempted Mars orbiter or possibly an orbiter/lander combination. The spacecraft and the Block D fourth stage were successfully launched into Earth orbit. The timer was supposed to ignite the stage 1.5 hours after launch, but had been erroneously set for 1.5 years. The spacecraft re-entered 2 days later on May 12, 1971.
Click to expand...

Epic fail.
 
pete.dakota said:
Not that I can recall. A joint collaboration mission between Russia and China is set to launch next year, though.
Click to expand...

That's not gonna be a Mars lander, that will be a Phobos lander. And the Chinese participation is limited to having their Mars mini satellite piggybacked to the main probe (if the whole thing ever happens).
 
Dude, coming in at 6km/s, into a thin atmosphere, with only a couple of chutes and some retro rockets ( to be used in the end game) only, makes it snappy. Its physics.

If they wanted to make it UN-snappy, it would have required large retro-rockets, which would require an even larger rocket .. which would cost a lot more money .. and so on.

~
Thomas
 
bro, snappy can mean different things and I was curious to what ryan meant. i know the details of this mission. thanks for trying though thomas.
 
Its like this quote by someone ( I don't remember,I think it was Tom Hanks in Apollo 13):

"Spaceflight/fighter piloting is several days/hours of boredom followed by a few minutes of sheer terror"

:speakcool:
Oh and BTW, it turns out I did interpret "snappy" correctly :beach:

~
Thomas
 
It sucks, before we even here that Phoenix has started EDL it would have already landed and it would of deployed it intruments and started sampeling.
 
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