Spirit has landed successfully and seems to be fully operational. On my local newspaper they had given news that it landed on the Gusev Crater, a little to the south of the equatorial line. The guys at NASA believe there might have been a lake there some millions or billions of years ago. Spirit will spend one week checking its devices before actually going to work. Then it’ll be even more productive than Pathfinder was.
In a few weeks Opportunity will be making its landing too, but on the other side of the planet.
On a related note, but millions of miles away from mars, another probe successfully collected material from the tail of a comet. I forgot the name of that probe so I can’t even find news about it on google >_< All I remember is that it’s making its way back to Earth and will land here by 2006, I think.
There are plenty of successes. Viking 1 and 2. Galileo. SoHo. Hubble. Voyager 1 and 2.
And there was more than one manned mission to the moon. Five in all I think.
Mars is interesting to explore because all it lacks to be able to sustain earthlike life is a little bit of heat and a little bit of oxygen. With a little bit of work, we’d have a second home.
There are bacteria that could live in Mars now if there was substrate for them to feed on. Extremophiles are bacteria that live on environments that would be too harsh for other beings to live on (volcanic crater mouths, acid fountains etc). Pick an anaerobe extremophile able to live on ultra-low pressure (and these do exist) and it may live on Mars. It would die soon, though, literally from “hunger”. Photosynthesis is out of question due to the lack of water. And since there is no organical compounds for bacteria to “eat”…
In Earth, there are also extremophile bacteria called litochemoautotrophic bacteria (I am almost sure I mispelled the litochemoautothrophy part). They live literally inside rocks very (and I mean very) deep in the ground in places where there is no oxygen nor light, and under pressures that would smash beings that live on the Deep Challenger in a few seconds. The litochemoautothrophy in the name means something like “self-feeding by chemically breaking (digesting) rock”. Mars surface could work as a substrate for them. Problem is they would pop up due to the low pressure. But if we created a transgenic brand of bacteria with the litochemoautothrophy capacities of these ones and the low-pressure support of the ones from the first paragraph, they could populate Mars really fast.