Blog #3

My Topic

                           Some of you are probably asking yourselves, what kind of missions has NASA launched that is leading up to the foundation of life on another planet and sending a man to Mars.  It all begins with many failed attempts to send orbiters, primarily Mariner 3 throughout the 1960's.  However, during the May of 1971, Mariner 9 marked Americas first spacecraft to orbit a planet other than our own.  Coming out of that mission, hopes were high for the next couple Mars rovers which came to be known as the Viking missions. Those were the rovers that would search for micro-organisms, in which it claim to have found, but after a checkup on the same martian soil, it claimed to have found lifeless soil.  

                         Another setback was the lack of spending for NASA, which caused the space agency to pick its top priority in order to have sufficient funding.  They chose the space shuttle, and would not return to Mars until a successive orbitor mission in 1996 aboard the Mars Global Surveyor. During the next year, NASA sent Sojourner, in which it demonstrated air bag technology as a landing system.  Arriving in January 2004, Spirit and Opportunity landed on the martian soil.