Infographics: all 42 spacecraft buried on other planets in the solar system

An impressive screensaver from Science Magazine

One of the main reasons for the past week was the Cassini probe , which ceased to exist in the dense layers of the atmosphere of the giant planet Saturn. On the same day, Science Magazine launched a project dedicated to all 42 spacecraft that ever left our homeland and found their last refuge on other planets.

Briefly about the project and about the distant devices-wanderers under the cut!

The project site contains several pages describing the steps of humanity in the conquest of the planets of our solar system with detailed statistics and a brief description of the tasks and fate of the vehicles.
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The first page of the infographic is devoted to statistics: what types of research stations were launched; what countries and in what volume they made efforts to study other planets (surprisingly, the USSR and the USA actually have parity in this question 19 vs. 20, respectively); what is the fate of these devices.

The picture below clearly shows the specialization of countries after the Lunar race: the USSR flew more to Venus, the United States to Mars. Although, of course, the United States overtook the USSR and Russia in the exploration of deep space (Jupiter, Saturn, and further with all the stops):


Actual parity between the USSR and the USA in the near-planetary space race

Interestingly, fate turned out to be more favorable to research stations aimed at studying Venus than from colleagues flying to Mars. Apparently the distance affects: from Earth to Venus, it varies from 38 to 261 million km, and to Mars from 55 to 401 million km.



The next part is devoted to the details of various missions, where briefly, literally in one sentence, the main results of the mission are explained, and it is also shown under what circumstances the apparatus itself perished. The map is interactive for each planet; the devices and approximate places are shown where their “remains” rest:


The short life of the Soviet mission on Mars. Mars-2 - the first terrestrial man-made object that touched the red planet

The editors of Science Magazine are definitely not without a great sense of humor. Cassini became the 42nd apparatus of terrestrial origin, which left the Earth and perished in the depths of Cosmos. This is an obvious reference to " The Main Question of Life, the Universe and All That" in the cult novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ", the answer to which was calculated by a computer, as 42.

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