The international scramble to reach Earth's neighbouring planet

TWO new spacecraft set off for Mars this month: India's Mars Orbiter Mission and America's MAVEN. Although exploring Mars still sounds futuristic, over half a century has passed since the Soviet Union began efforts to send robots there. It has not been easy. The success rate is slightly less than 50%, leading to phlegmatic jokes among astronomers about the "Great Galactic Ghoul"—an invisible, space-dwelling monster whose preferred diet is Martian space probes. Yet a half-century of exploration has also allowed scientists and cartographers to draw detailed maps. The one below shows the location of the successful landers and rovers that have reached the Martian surface. (A word of caution: the map’s blue sections do not represent water but parts of the surface below a certain altitude. It is also a Mercator projection, which distorts distances near the poles. Hence, our map shows only the mid-latitudes. The Phoenix lander should properly be shown somewhere north of the map's top edge.)