An interactive Mars with the real terminator, axial tilt and rotation driven by the clock, 17 places human hardware reached that you can click, and the orbiters and both moons positioned live from NASA/JPL Horizons ephemerides. Replay the whole space age from 1960, or read the catalogue of 110 Mars missions behind the globe, with sourced facts, photos, and the failures too. Free, no signup, no ads.
The orbiters flying on the globe right now: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, 2001 Mars Odyssey, ESA's Mars Express, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and the UAE's Hope, all positioned from NASA/JPL Horizons ephemerides refreshed twice a day. China's Tianwen-1 has no published ephemeris, so it appears as an approximate dashed orbit, clearly labelled.
The narrated tour on the globe runs about 9 minutes in 17chapters; press Guided tour, bottom left, to hear it. This is every word of it, for reading, for screen readers, and for anyone who would rather not play audio. Every claim in it is sourced on the mission pages linked above and was checked against those sources before it was recorded. The voice is synthetic (ElevenLabs), and the script was written by us. The music under it is ‘Hymn To The Dawn’ by Scott Buckley, released under CC-BY 4.0 (www.scottbuckley.com.au, creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), a four-minute excerpt, gently levelled and looped for the tour. At a few moments a photograph the globe cannot show fills the screen for a sentence or two; each is listed under its chapter below with its credit and source, and they can be switched off from the tour's chapter list.
This is Mars as it faces the Sun at this moment, with daylight where it really falls. A day here, a sol, is about forty minutes longer than ours. Seventeen lights on this globe mark places where machines from Earth arrived. For more than a century people have asked this planet one question above all: whether anything lives here, or ever did. This tour follows that question.
In 1877 the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped Mars and drew fine dark lines he called canali, a word that can mean channels. In English they became canals, and Percival Lowell, above all, imagined Martian engineers. About two hundred schoolboys, in 1902 and 1903, copied drawings of Mars, most of them with dots and smudges but no lines. Boys sitting halfway back in the room drew lines that were not there. Most of the canals were in the eye.
The first two Mars probes, Soviet launches in October 1960, never even reached Earth orbit. In July 1965 NASA's Mariner 4 flew past and took the first close-up photographs of another planet. It sent back twenty-one pictures and part of a twenty-second. They showed craters, and no canals. Its radio signal found the air pressure there less than one per cent of Earth's. The question had its first close look, and it was bleak.
Photograph: Mariner 4 frame 11, 1965. Frame 11, the picture Robert Leighton called one of the most remarkable scientific photographs of the age. The big basin is now called Mariner crater. NASA/JPL. Mariner 4
In November 1971 Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. It arrived during a dust storm that hid almost all of Mars. Early on, little but four dark spots showed through: volcano summits above the dust. One is Olympus Mons, by NASA's measure the tallest volcano in the solar system, more than twenty kilometres high. Mariner 9 also found dry channels its team could hardly explain without water.
Thirteen days after Mariner 9 arrived, a capsule from the Soviet probe Mars 2 became the first human-made object to reach the surface of Mars. It crashed. By its designers' own account, the computer had corrected an error that did not exist. Five days later Mars 3 made the first confirmed soft landing on Mars, began sending a picture, and fell silent almost at once. What came back was a strip of grey, with no detail anyone could be sure of.
Photograph: Mars 3's 79 lines, 1971. The 79 lines Mars 3 sent from the surface. What, if anything, the picture contains is still disputed. USSR, Mars 3 lander telephotometer, via Wikimedia Commons (scan sourced from The Planetary Society). Mars 3
Viking 1 set down in Chryse Planitia in July 1976, seven years to the day after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. It was the first spacecraft to land on Mars and keep working. It carried three experiments to catch life eating, breathing, or building itself out of the air. All three returned signals. But another instrument found no organic molecules it could attribute to Mars, and most scientists came to explain the signals by soil chemistry. In 2026 the argument was still running in journals.
The eye kept at it. Days after Viking 1 landed, its orbiter photographed a hill in Cydonia that looked like a face. NASA itself released the picture within a week, blaming the shadows. The face was about thirty pixels wide, and part of a nostril was data lost on the way home. Since 1998, every far sharper picture has shown an ordinary eroded hill.
Photograph: Viking 1 orbiter, 25 July 1976. Viking 1 orbiter frame 035A72, 25 July 1976, enlarged from data at about 46 metres per pixel, which makes the whole Face roughly thirty pixels across. The Sun was low. The black speckles are bits lost on the radio link home, and NASA's own caption says they form part of one eye and one nostril. NASA/JPL, Viking 1 Orbiter frame 035A72 (JPL release P-17384, 31 July 1976; NASA Photojournal PIA01141). The Face on Mars
Photograph (detail, enlarged): The Face in frame 035A72. Cut from the photograph above. The Face on Mars
Photographs (details, enlarged): The same hill, 1976 and 2007. One is cut from the photograph above; beside it: HiRISE on 5 April 2007, at 29.9 centimetres per pixel from 299 kilometres up, roughly 154 times sharper than the Viking frame in the data; the web browse version reproduced here is about ten times coarser than that. The Sun was low again, about 17 degrees above the horizon, and it still looks like a hill. The scale bar is 500 metres. NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona, HiRISE observation PSP_003234_2210. The Face on Mars
Asking has a price. In November 1982 a battery update sent from Earth overwrote the memory that aimed Viking 1's antenna, and the lander never answered again. Ten missions set out for Mars between 1988 and 1999. Only two did all they were sent to do. One was Mars Global Surveyor, and the other was Pathfinder, whose rover, Sojourner, put the first wheels on Mars. Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because one ground program used imperial units where the specification called for metric.
On Christmas Day 2003, Europe's first Mars mission, Mars Express, went into orbit, where it has circled ever since. Its small British lander, Beagle 2, came down that morning and was never heard from. Eleven years later a camera in orbit found it, in one piece, its solar panels apparently not fully open. The lander's lead scientist, Colin Pillinger, had died less than a year before.
Reprocessed photograph: Beagle 2 found by HiRISE, 2015. Enlarged, the speck breaks into a cluster of bright points. That shape is why the team concluded the panels had partly deployed, and why the fourth one is blamed for the silence. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona/University of Leicester (the image itself is captioned HiRISE/NASA/JPL/Parker/Leicester). Beagle 2
By 2004, the question had found a method: follow the water. That January, twin rovers landed on opposite sides of Mars. A nine-year-old girl, adopted from a Siberian orphanage, had named them Spirit and Opportunity. Three years later Spirit, dragging a dead wheel, ploughed up soil about ninety per cent pure silica, a deposit that needs water to form. Opportunity, within weeks of landing, found rocks that liquid water had once soaked. Built for ninety sols, it worked for more than fourteen years. In June 2018 a dust storm wrapped the planet and blotted out its Sun. Opportunity was finishing a panorama when it fell silent, and a few frames in one corner never got their last colours.
Photograph: Opportunity's last panorama. The last thing Opportunity sent. The black and white patch at bottom left is the part of the panorama it did not live to finish in colour. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU. Opportunity (MER-B)
From orbit in 2002, Mars Odyssey found hydrogen buried under the high latitudes, almost certainly ice. So in May 2008, Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic to dig. Pale chunks in its trench vanished over four days, as water ice does and salt does not. Phoenix also detected perchlorate, a salt that destroys organic molecules when heated, and the argument over Viking reopened. Then its sunlight faded ahead of winter, and the lander died where it stood.
Photographs: One trench, sols 20 and 24. The evidence, four days apart. A cluster of bright lumps in the lower left of the Dodo-Goldilocks trench on sol 20 had gone by sol 24 and left no residue, which fits water ice rather than salt. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University. Phoenix
Curiosity came down in August 2012, lowered into Gale crater on cords by a rocket-powered sky crane. In 2013 it showed that the crater once held a lake that microbes could have lived in. Nobody has shown that any did. By the end of August 2026, Curiosity had climbed a full kilometre above where it landed.
Other countries joined the asking. In 2014 India became the first Asian nation to reach Mars orbit, and the first country to succeed on its maiden attempt. In February 2021, three nations reached Mars in just over a week. The United Arab Emirates sent Hope, the first interplanetary mission by an Arab nation. NASA sent Perseverance, and China sent Tianwen-1. Tianwen means Heavenly Questions. No mission before it had delivered an orbiter, a lander and a working rover to Mars in a single launch. Its rover, Zhurong, worked about four times its planned life, then went to sleep for the winter and never woke.
Reprocessed photograph: Hope, orbit 47, 1 May 2021. Orbit 47, 1 May 2021, from 21,519 km up. This is what the mission was designed around: one spacecraft high enough to hold the entire planet in view at once. Processed from public EMM data by Andrea Luck. UAESA/MBRSC/HopeMarsMission/EXI/AndreaLuck, CC BY 2.0. Hope (Emirates Mars Mission)
Perseverance was sent to Jezero, a crater where a river once ran into a lake, because rock laid down in still water could keep signs of ancient life. With it came Ingenuity, a helicopter carrying a scrap of fabric from the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer. In April 2021 Ingenuity rose into the thin Martian air: the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another planet. Built for up to five flights, it flew seventy-two.
Photograph: Ingenuity's shadow, first flight. The first flight, seen from the aircraft. Ingenuity's navigation camera caught its own shadow while hovering at 3 m on 19 April 2021. The frame is 640 by 480 pixels, which is all that camera ever produced. NASA/JPL-Caltech. Ingenuity
In July 2024 Perseverance drilled a rock called Cheyava Falls, marked with pale spots ringed in black, nicknamed leopard spots. NASA calls what it found a potential biosignature: something that might have been made by life, but needs more study. The paper's lead author placed it at step three on a seven-step scale for claiming life. Settling it would very probably need the sample in a laboratory on Earth. It is sealed in a tube aboard the rover. Ten older tubes, a backup set laid down before it was found, lie on the crater floor.
Photograph (annotated): Cheyava Falls, July 2024. Cheyava Falls, photographed by Perseverance's arm-mounted WATSON camera on 18 July 2024, three days before the rover cored it. The red callouts are NASA's, marking a single millimetre-scale leopard spot and a grain of olivine. It is evidence of an unusual chemical texture in a martian mudstone. It is not a fossil, and nobody has claimed it is one. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, PIA26368, annotated version. Life on Mars
The clock has caught up. Nothing is scheduled to bring Perseverance's samples home: the mission meant to fetch them was cancelled in 2026. China's Tianwen-3 is planned to collect its own pieces of Mars and bring them to Earth around 2031. That needs something never done: a rocket launched from the surface of Mars. Europe's Rosalind Franklin rover is waiting for its launch, with a drill designed to reach two metres down. Japan's MMX is built to land on Phobos, the larger of Mars's two moons, and bring a piece of it home. Nothing from Earth has landed there yet. NASA's twin ESCAPADE orbiters are due at Mars in September 2027. No country has yet funded a mission to send people to Mars.
On the last day of September 2026, Mars began its thirty-ninth year, as scientists count them. One of the lights on this globe belongs to a museum. In 1984 NASA gave ownership of Viking 1, still standing on its plain, to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. A plaque for the lander waits in the museum's keeping for astronauts to carry it here. Fifty years after Viking first looked, there is no confirmed evidence of life on Mars, past or present. The honest answer is still that nobody knows. Thank you for taking azmth's Mars tour.
Not affiliated with NASA, ESA, CNSA or any space agency. Mars maps: USGS Astrogeology (Viking colour mosaic) and NASA MOLA terrain. Orbiter and moon positions: NASA/JPL Horizons. Phobos and Deimos shapes: PDS Small Bodies Node (P. C. Thomas). Spacecraft models: NASA 3D Resources.