Mars Madness – Walt Hickey

Mars Madness

Mars is fascinating, so fascinating that FiveThirtyEight is spending a whole month just writing about it. Given that it’s March Madness — and given humanity’s longstanding tradition of hurling robots and cameras at Mars with varying degrees of success, you know, like a free throw — we wanted to figure out the winner of the ultimate Martian bracket.

Seeds and such come later, but for now, merely select the cooler Mars mission or landmark:

Which is the cooler mission or landmark?

Battle: : Mars

Phoenix Mars Lander (2007)

Landed near Mars’ north pole and returned more than 25 gigabytes of data. The mission was successful and all planed experiments were completed. The lander died after five months on Mars.

Mars 6 Orbiter (1973)

Successful flyby.