The phrase "a previous mission" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a mission that occurred before the current one being discussed.
Example: "The team learned valuable lessons from a previous mission that helped them succeed this time."
Alternatives: "an earlier mission" or "a prior mission".
The planet has surprisingly a high density, and a previous mission also found an unexpectedly strong magnetic field.
An article in Science Times yesterday about a repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope misstated the year of a previous mission.
(His picture from a previous mission also hangs in the MIT sailing pavilion). He spent much of his free time looking down at Earth and taking pictures.
PIMMS is a tool for estimating the source flux or count rate for a specific mission from either a count rate estimated by a previous mission or flux in some energy bound.
In a previous mission posting, there was a woman in my office who was frustrated about my lack of response to her constant demands of "Who is your girlfriend?", "Why don't you have one?" or "Why don't you let me find you one?" She once cornered me in her office and told me about her religious thoughts on homosexuality.
"The control system is usually not very reliable," says IKI astronomer Alexander Zakharov, who cites problems with a similar system on a previous mission.
Because of the delay, Young and Duke began their descent to the surface at an altitude higher than that of any previous mission, at 20.1 km.
Curiosity will be landing in Gale Crater, a far rougher landscape than the landing sites of any previous mission.
PSP will fly closer to the sun than any previous mission.
That is much closer to our nearest star than any previous mission, and well within the orbit of Mercury.
They dispatch Cooper and several others through a wormhole, a shortcut through spacetime, to learn if any previous missions have succeeded.
