Missions to Mars
This fabulous graphic (click to zoom) shows all of our excursions to the Red Planet so far.
If anything it shows just how difficult this space probe business is - we have a 52.4 per cent failure rate when it comes to throwing stuff at our nearest neighbour.
This is very close to the failure rate of the poor old Xbox 360 (54.2 per cent).
So I would be very nervous if I was an astronaut on the first manned mission.
There's a simple solution to all this, of course, just send two!
Weird Science Factoid: Animals will not eat another animal that has been hit by a lightning strike. You have to show some respect to the very unlucky...
Join the Weird Science Facebook group here, or follow us on Twitter here or by searching for weirdsciblog.
Want to be sent the 'best' of the Weird Sci Blog every month? Then sign up for Weird News - a newsletter containing more info about the subjects we cover, plus some extra stuff that didn't make the blog. Interested? Subscribe by e-mailing wscience@me.com with the title 'count me in' and we'll do the rest.
Older/Newer
« The amazing journey of the UK and Ireland | How many aliens are there? »
2 Comments
Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
Wow. I must admit I had no idea we had attempted that many missions to mars, let alone had such a failure rate. As you say, the graphic is a nice way of representing it, however when I click on it it does enlarge but I can't then see it all.
There is a way round it. Click on the image and then save it to your desktop and open it from there - it's a pretty big image!