Exploration of Mars on November 5, 1964, but the shroud encasing the spacecraft atop its rocket failed to open properly, dooming the mission. Three weeks later, on November 28, 1964, Mariner 4 was launched successfully on a 7½-month voyage to Mars.. Mariner 4 flew past Mars on July 14, 1965, providing the first close-up photographs of another planet. The pictures, gradually played back to Earth from a small tape recorder on the probe, showed impact craters. It provided radically more accurate data about the planet; a surface atmospheric pressure of about 1% of Earth's and daytime temperatures of −100 °C (−148 °F) were
Human mission to Mars were for a launch sometime between 2016 and 2020. The Mars probe would carry a crew of four to five cosmonauts, who would spend close to two years in space. In late 2011, Russian and European space agencies successfully completed the ground-based MARS-500. The biomedical experiment simulating crewed flight to Mars was completed in Russia in July 2000. In 2011, Jean-Marc Salotti published a new proposal for a crewed Mars mission, with a release in 2012. The 2-4-2 concept is based on a reduction of the crew size to only 2 astronauts and the duplication of the entire mission. There