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Mission record

Mars 96

Also known as Mars 96 Orbiter, M1 No.520, Mars96Orbiter

Russian Space Agency · Launched

Explore trajectory

Failed · Failure

The Russian Mars 96 mission was designed to send an orbiter, two small autonomous stations, and two surface penetrators to Mars to investigate the evolution and contemporary physics of the planet by studying the physical and chemical processes which took place in the past and which currently take place. The Mars 96 spacecraft was launched into Earth orbit, but failed to achieve insertion into Mars cruise trajectory and re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at about 00:45 to 01:30 UT on 17 November 1996 and crashed within a presumed 320 km by 80 km area which includes parts of the Pacific Ocean, Chile, and Bolivia. The cause of the crash is not known.

Destinations
Launch vehicle
Proton-K
Launch site
Tyuratam (Baikonur Cosmodrome), Kazakhstan
Countries
Russia
Mission types
Orbiter, Lander, Impactor

Chronology

Mission timeline

  1. Launch

    Launched on a Proton-K

    NSSDCA's launch/orbital information page gives the launch date and time as 1996-11-16T20:48:53Z. The Mars 96 Orbiter was a 3-axis sun/star stabilized craft based on the Phobos design with two platforms for pointing and stabilizing instruments; the two penetrators were mounted on the bottom by the propulsion system and the two small stations were connected on top of the spacecraft. The one page disagrees with itself about the mass and the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved: its Facts in Brief prints Mass: 3159 kg while its own text says the spacecraft had a launch mass (including propellant) of 6180 kg.

    Earth

  2. Mission end

    Re-entered over the Pacific, Chile and Bolivia

    The Mars 96 spacecraft was launched into Earth orbit, but failed to achieve insertion into Mars cruise trajectory and re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at about 00:45 to 01:30 UT on 17 November 1996 and crashed within a presumed 320 km by 80 km area which includes parts of the Pacific Ocean, Chile, and Bolivia. The cause of the crash is not known. The launch/orbital information page prints Decay Date: 1996-11-17 and no trajectory details at all. Mars 96 was scheduled to arrive at Mars on 12 September 1997, about 10 months after launch, on a direct trajectory. The contemporaneous NSSDCA timeline gives a broad 00:45–01:30 UTC window and uncertain attribution of an object tracked at 00:49. Blok D-2 reentered separately on November 18; its later Pacific location is not the Mars 96 spacecraft location.

    Earth

Mission architecture

Vehicles

  • Mars 96 Orbiter · Orbiter

    Destinations: Mars

    • Small autonomous station 1 · Lander

    • Small autonomous station 2 · Lander

    • Surface penetrator 1 · Probe

    • Surface penetrator 2 · Probe

Trajectory record

Trajectory dataset not yet available

Known dates and encounters do not uniquely determine a flight path. This mission’s sourced timeline is available above; no verified trajectory is currently published here.

What is needed to reconstruct this path?
  • A frame-qualified position and vector velocity at an epoch, or equivalent complete orbital elements.
  • Separate state histories and release epochs for the listed vehicles; a parent mission trajectory cannot be assigned to every component.
  • Finer event-time constraints where required by an orbital reconstruction; the stored day/month/year precision is retained.
  • The actual failed-flight state history. Intended destinations are not evidence that the spacecraft reached them.

Provenance

Sources

Each source is listed once and labeled with the mission, event, trajectory, or destination/body context it supports.

Data verified through September 14, 2026