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15 milestones, in chronological order.
- 28 November 1659The Telescope Era
Huygens draws a spot on Mars and clocks the day
Huygens sketched a dark triangle on Mars, watched it come back night after night, and concluded a Martian day runs about 24 hours. He was 37 minutes out.
- 1840The Telescope Era
The first real map of Mars, and a zero meridian
Ten years of watching through a 95 mm refractor in a Berlin garden produced the first true map of another planet — and a prime meridian Mars still uses.
- August 1877Canals and Dreamers
Asaph Hall finds two moons in six nights
Mars came within 56 million kilometres in 1877. Hall had nearly given up the search when, six nights apart, he caught Deimos and then Phobos.
- 15 July 1965First Contact
Mariner 4 photographs a cratered, near-airless Mars
Twenty-one grainy frames replaced the canals with craters, and a radio occultation put the surface pressure near one percent of Earth's.
- 14 November 1971First Contact
Mariner 9 arrives into a planet-wide dust storm
The first spacecraft ever to orbit another planet reached Mars to find the surface hidden by dust. It waited, then mapped volcanoes, a 4,000 km canyon and dry riverbeds.
- 27 November and 2 December 1971First Contact
Mars 3 lands, transmits for 20 seconds, and stops
Mars 2's lander crashed and became the first human object on the surface. Mars 3 touched down intact, sent 20 seconds of signal, and went silent for good.
- 20 July and 3 September 1976First Contact
Viking 1 and 2 land and refuse to die
Two orbiters, two landers and roughly a billion 1970s dollars. Designed for 90 days on the surface, Viking 1 kept transmitting from Chryse Planitia for over six years.
- 4 July 1997The Rover Decades
Pathfinder bounces onto Mars and lets Sojourner out
Airbags took the shock: the lander rebounded twelve metres, bounced at least fifteen more times across Ares Vallis, then opened to release Sojourner, 10.6 kg of rover.
- 24 September 2014Follow the Water
Mangalyaan reaches Mars orbit on the first try
India placed a 15-kilogram science payload in Mars orbit for about 74 million dollars, becoming the first nation to reach Mars orbit on its first attempt.
- 26 November 2018Follow the Water
Two CubeSats fly to Mars and call the landing live
MarCO-A and MarCO-B, 13.5 kilograms each, were the first CubeSats ever to leave Earth orbit — and they carried InSight's descent telemetry home live at 8 kilobits per second.
- 9 February 2021The Present Push
Hope arrives, and the Arab world reaches another planet
The UAE had no deep-space programme six years before a 27-minute burn spent half of Hope's fuel to capture the first interplanetary mission flown by any Arab nation.
- 10 February – 15 May 2021The Present Push
China arrives at Mars and lands a rover on its first try
Tianwen-1 entered orbit on 10 February and dropped Zhurong onto Utopia Planitia three months later — orbiter, lander and rover delivered on a country's first attempt.
- 18 February 2021The Present Push
Perseverance lands in Jezero, and we watch it happen
Five off-the-shelf cameras filmed the parachute opening and the sky crane lowering a one-tonne rover into a dry river delta. The descent microphone recorded nothing usable.
- 19 April 2021 – 18 January 2024The Present Push
Ingenuity flies, then breaks its blades on a dune
A 1.8 kg helicopter hovered three metres above Jezero for forty seconds. Seventy-two flights later, featureless sand confused its navigation camera and damaged all four blades.
- 20 April 2021 – 7 August 2023The Present Push
MOXIE makes oxygen out of Martian air
Perseverance carried a toaster-sized box that heated Martian carbon dioxide to 800°C and made 5.4 grams of oxygen — the first time a spacecraft manufactured a consumable on another planet.