Every Mars Landing Site, Mapped: All 16 Attempts and What Each One Found

Sixteen spacecraft have entered the Martian atmosphere intending to land. Five of them are wreckage. That ratio is the real story of Mars exploration, and it is the one thing the usual landing-site map cannot tell you — those maps plot the dots that survived and quietly drop the ones that did not.

Below is every attempt, with coordinates, the region it came down in, and what the mission actually produced. Three have no coordinate at all, and the reason turns out to be one of the more interesting things on the list.

One note on the numbers: longitudes are given east 0–360°, the convention modern mission documentation uses. Older maps often count westward, so the same site can carry two different numbers — Gale Crater is 137.44°E here and 222.56°W on a 1990s chart. Both are the same patch of ground. Every located site is plotted on our interactive Mars map, which uses these coordinates.

The complete list

In arrival order. Where a mission has a dossier, its name links to it.

• Mars 2 — USSR, 27 Nov 1971. not located, region unknown. Crashed — and so became the first human-made object to reach the surface.

• Mars 3 — USSR, 2 Dec 1971. 45.00°S, 202.00°E, Terra Sirenum. The first soft landing in history, followed by about twenty seconds of transmission.

• Mars 6 — USSR, 12 Mar 1974. not located, Margaritifer Terra (target). Sent data during descent, then went silent at touchdown.

• Viking 1 — NASA, 20 Jul 1976. 22.48°N, 312.05°E, Chryse Planitia. The first fully successful landing; it ran for six years.

• Viking 2 — NASA, 3 Sep 1976. 47.97°N, 134.28°E, Utopia Planitia. The northern twin, operating for nearly four years.

• Mars Pathfinder — NASA, 4 Jul 1997. 19.13°N, 326.79°E, Ares Vallis. Delivered Sojourner, the first rover to drive on Mars.

• Mars Polar Lander — NASA, 3 Dec 1999. not located, south polar layered terrain (target). Lost during descent and never found.

• Beagle 2 — ESA, 25 Dec 2003. 11.53°N, 90.43°E, Isidis Planitia. Silent on arrival — but identified on the surface in orbital images in 2015.

• Spirit — NASA, 4 Jan 2004. 14.57°S, 175.48°E, Gusev Crater. Drove 7.7 km and found mineral evidence of ancient hot water.

• Opportunity — NASA, 25 Jan 2004. 1.95°S, 354.47°E, Meridiani Planum. Drove 45 km across fourteen years, on a ninety-day design life.

• Phoenix — NASA, 25 May 2008. 68.22°N, 234.25°E, Vastitas Borealis. Dug down and touched water ice a few centimetres below the surface.

• Curiosity — NASA, 6 Aug 2012. 4.59°S, 137.44°E, Gale Crater. Still working, reading a long-lived lake bed layer by layer.

• Schiaparelli — ESA, 19 Oct 2016. impact site imaged, Meridiani Planum. Crashed; the wreckage was photographed from orbit soon afterwards.

• InSight — NASA, 26 Nov 2018. 4.50°N, 135.62°E, Elysium Planitia. Measured marsquakes and mapped the crust, mantle and core.

• Perseverance — NASA, 18 Feb 2021. 18.44°N, 77.45°E, Jezero Crater. Caching samples in a river delta for a later return flight; carried Ingenuity, whose own mission ended in 2024.

• Zhurong — CNSA, 14 May 2021. 25.07°N, 109.93°E, Utopia Planitia. The first CNSA rover, successful on the agency’s first landing attempt; hibernating since May 2022 and not heard from since.

Three of those vehicles were carried by another: Sojourner rode down inside Pathfinder, Ingenuity under Perseverance, and Zhurong on the Tianwen-1 lander. They are listed under the spacecraft that delivered them, because that is where the coordinate belongs.

Why three of them have no coordinate

A dot on a map is a claim. For Mars 2, Mars 6 and Mars Polar Lander, nobody can make it: those spacecraft went silent during or just after descent, and their wreckage has never been identified in orbital imagery. Each has a targeted landing area, and you will see confident-looking dots for them on some published maps — but a target is where a spacecraft was aimed, not where it ended up. Our map leaves them off rather than plot a coordinate we would have to invent.

Beagle 2 is the exception that proves the rule. It failed exactly as completely as the other three — no signal, ever — but in 2015 orbital images identified the lander on the surface at 11.53°N, 90.43°E, in Isidis Planitia. The moment the wreck was found, the dot became real. Schiaparelli sits in between: its impact site in Meridiani Planum was photographed from orbit shortly after the 2016 crash, so its location is genuinely known.

That distinction — targeted versus located — is why counting Mars landings is harder than it looks, and why two reputable sources can print different totals for the same list.

What the landings actually established

Read in order, the list is not sixteen isolated events. It is four questions, each one opened by the answer to the last.

Can you get down at all? (1971–1976) Mars 2 and Mars 3 arrived during a planet-encircling dust storm, a plausible contributor to both failures. Mars 3 managed the first soft landing in history and then stopped after roughly twenty seconds — long enough to prove the manoeuvre was possible and not much else. Five years later Viking 1 and Viking 2 settled the question completely, operating for six years and nearly four respectively and returning the first sustained surface weather record.

Can you move? (1997–2004) Pathfinder’s Sojourner was the size of a microwave oven and drove about a hundred metres, which was the entire point: it showed that a rover could survive landing and then choose where to look. Spirit and Opportunity turned that demonstration into a method. Both were built for ninety days. Spirit lasted six years and found mineral evidence of ancient hot water; Opportunity lasted fourteen and drove 45 kilometres, a distance nobody designing it would have promised.

Is there water? (2008–2012) Phoenix landed far north specifically to dig, and found water ice a few centimetres down — not inferred from orbit, but scraped and photographed. Curiosity then landed in Gale Crater to read the geological record rather than sample the present, working through a stack of sediments deposited in a long-lived lake.

Was there life, and can we bring the evidence home? (2018–today) InSight’s seismometers turned Mars from a surface into an interior, measuring crust, mantle and core through marsquakes. Perseverance is doing something no earlier mission attempted: sealing samples for a later flight back to Earth, chosen from a river delta because a delta is where sediment — and any preserved biosignatures — collects. Zhurong, meanwhile, made CNSA the second agency to land and operate a rover on Mars, and it worked on the first attempt: the rover covered 1,921 metres over 358 days against a three-month design life, then entered planned hibernation in May 2022. It should have woken that December. Mission staff have attributed the silence to more dust settling on its solar panels than expected, and orbital images show it has not moved since.

What every successful site has in common

Run down the coordinates and a pattern appears: apart from Phoenix at 68°N, every successful landing sits within roughly 30° of the equator, and every one is on low, flat ground. That is not a scientific preference — it is what the hardware allows. Lower latitudes get more sunlight for solar power and gentler temperatures; low elevation means more atmosphere overhead to slow a descending spacecraft, which matters enormously when a parachute has thin air to work with; flat terrain means fewer rocks to land on.

Those constraints tighten again for a crewed mission, which needs accessible water ice as well — and ice pushes the target north, away from the equatorial comfort zone. We work through that trade-off, and the shortlist it produces, in where the first Mars colony would land.

One site chosen, not yet flown

Oxia Planum — 18.28°N, 335.37°E. The landing region selected for ESA’s Rosalind Franklin rover, picked for clay-rich terrain that formed in water. After years in which the launch date moved repeatedly, the mission finally has a target: NASA’s ROSA project is supplying the launch service along with the lander’s braking engines, radioisotope heater units and a mass spectrometer, it has selected a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A, and it is targeting a launch no earlier than late 2028 — a window that would put the rover on the surface in 2030.

Note the wording. “No earlier than” is NASA’s own phrasing, and the agency has not published a landing date; the 2030 arrival follows from the launch window rather than from a committed schedule. Until something is actually down there, our map draws the site as a dashed ring rather than a solid pin. The coordinate is the approved centre of the named feature, which sits inside the published landing region.

FAQ

How many Mars landings have there been?

Sixteen dedicated landing attempts have entered the atmosphere, from Mars 2 in 1971 to Zhurong in 2021. Totals published elsewhere range from about fifteen to twenty-one, depending on whether the count treats rovers separately from the landers that delivered them, includes spacecraft that failed before arrival, and counts small penetrator probes.

How many Mars landings were successful?

Eleven of the sixteen returned data from the surface: Mars 3 (barely — about twenty seconds), Viking 1, Viking 2, Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity, InSight, Perseverance and Zhurong. The five failures are Mars 2, Mars 6, Mars Polar Lander, Beagle 2 and Schiaparelli. Counting Mars 3 as a success is a judgement call: it landed intact and transmitted, which is more than the other four managed, but it returned no usable science.

Where is the best place to land on Mars?

For robots it has been the low equatorial plains and the craters that hold a readable geological record — which is why Gale and Jezero were chosen over more dramatic terrain. For people the answer shifts north, because the deciding factor stops being science and becomes accessible water ice.

Which year will humans land on Mars?

No crewed landing date is confirmed by anyone. SpaceX has stated an intention to send uncrewed Starships during a transfer window, and those windows open only about every 26 months, so missing one costs more than two years. Treat any specific year you see as a target rather than a schedule.

Why is Mars so hard to land on?

It has just enough atmosphere to require a heat shield, and nowhere near enough to stop you with one. Parachutes that would work on Earth are close to useless in air about 1% as dense, so every successful lander has needed retro-rockets, airbags or a powered descent stage as well — a sequence that has to run perfectly, with no possibility of intervention from Earth given a signal delay of minutes.

Sources

The coordinates and outcomes above match the mission records collected in our Mars mission timeline, which cites an agency source for each entry, and the points plotted on our interactive map. Published landing-site maps from NASA and The Planetary Society were used to cross-check the set of attempts.