The high dose means that spacecraft bound for Mars will need good shielding to protect their human inhabitants.
Other spacecraft bound for the Martian surface have barrelled straight past the planet or simply clattered into the surface.
1988 Two Russian spacecraft bound for the Martian moon of Phobos suffer critical failures, though one returns photos of Mars.
A South African millionaire who has dreamed of rockets and space flight since he was a boy is to become the world's second space tourist on Thursday when he blasts off in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station.
NASA is asking the public to submit tweets and images by means of social media on the subject of solar system exploration in 2014 and what it might be like in 2023, which will then be dispatched on its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft bound for the asteroid Bennu.
The spacecraft bound for Pluto roused itself from its latest hibernation on Saturday at noon PST.
An earlier attempt to do this was made by Carl Sagan using Nasa's Jupiter-bound spacecraft Galileo during its flyby of Earth in 1990.
If the Mars-bound spacecraft misses its launch window, it would not get off the ground until 2016 when Mars and Earth next come back into a favorable alignment.
Despite the loss of two Mars-bound spacecraft last year, the reliable Mars Global Surveyor keeps orbiting the planet 12 times a day, well into the third year of its mission, and taking mapping pictures of the landscape that are up to 50 times as detailed as any previous photography there.
Lifting off on a Russian Proton-M rocket, the Mars-bound spacecraft has begun its 7 month, 300 million mile long journey and is scheduled to arrive in October.
That's not all, though – for people looking for an even more escapist experience from their car, both Model S and Model X owners with the update can 'transform' their vehicles into a Mars-bound spacecraft; the one his other company, SpaceX, is building to send colonists to the red planet.
