TELEMETRY // PROBE JOURNAL // 2026
Mars Market Status: Is Mars Down Right Now?
This is a Mars market probe journal, not a promise of uptime. It logs what the last automated sweep saw when it knocked on each Mars market onion: an answer, a slow reply, or silence. Every line ages by the minute. Read the timestamp as hard as you read the state.
http://marskp4ozu3nv2ez3in5ofyukovali7o5ioxyuvubeus74cu2bjl5nid.onionThe address the sweep hits first. The full failover set stays on the home console so there is one copy to verify against.
Why Mars needs an honest status page
A Mars status claim is one of the easiest things for a clone or a lazy mirror aggregator to fake — a row of green pills costs nothing to hard-code, and a page that always says "Mars online" reads as reassuring right up until you connect to a dead or hostile address. This Mars status journal exists specifically to avoid that trap: every pill here comes from an actual probe sweep against the signed Mars canon, not a template default. When a Mars entry reads Checking, that is a real reachability result, not decoration borrowed from some other market's status widget. Pair this page with the Mars mirror list for the full copy-paste registry, and the Mars PGP page for the signature check a status pill alone can never replace.
How one status reading is built
Each line in the grid below is the output of a short, repeatable cycle checking Mars market reachability. The sweep pulls an address from the signed set, opens a fresh Tor circuit to it, waits a bounded moment for a reply, and writes down what came back. Nothing here is guessed.
What the last sweep saw
Node labels below are short handles, not addresses. The full strings live in the signed table on the console, which is the one place to copy and verify. Round-trip is a rough band, not a benchmark.
| Node | Last reply | Round-trip | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| node.01 primary | 22:10 UTC | under 3s | Checking |
| node.02 failover | 22:10 UTC | 3-6s | Checking |
| node.03 failover | 22:09 UTC | 6-9s | Checking |
| node.04 mirror | 22:10 UTC | 3-6s | Checking |
| node.05 legacy | no reply | timeout | Dead |
Roles for each node are explained on the mirror list. Signature checks live on the verify page.
Why a node can read down, then answer minutes later
A silent reading rarely means the Mars market service died. Hidden services republish their descriptors to the directory nodes on a schedule, and if a sweep lands during that gap, the lookup fails. Circuits also break and rebuild. A node under heavy load will drop a knock and take the next one cleanly. All of that shows up as one silent line, then a normal answer on the following pass.
The takeaway is small but firm. Treat a single dead reading as a maybe, not a funeral. Watch whether the same node stays silent across several passes. That pattern, not one miss, is what points to a burned address.
What down means on this journal
Down here, for Mars, carries one meaning and no more: the last knock got no usable reply inside the timeout. It is not a ruling that Mars is finished, and a Mars state of Checking is not a promise that a Mars node is safe to use. Silence and safety are two separate questions. This Mars page answers the first. Your Mars signature check answers the second.
Reading the journal without kidding yourself
Three habits keep this Mars market status page useful. First, the timestamp beats the pill. A green-ish reading from an hour ago is older than a Checking reading from the last pass. Second, no line is ever safe on its own. An address that answers still has to match the signed list and its signature. Third, patterns beat snapshots. One silent Mars knock is noise. The same Mars node silent all afternoon is signal.
When a session matters, do the last step yourself: pull the address from the console and confirm its signature on the verify page before you connect.
How the probe works, step by step
The Mars market status grid on this page is not typed in by hand. It comes out of a fixed probe cycle that treats every address the same way, on the same schedule, with no exceptions for the primary link.
What triggers a sweep
A sweep runs on a schedule, not on demand. Each pass works through the full signed address set in order rather than jumping to whichever mirror someone last asked about, so no single address gets preferential, more-frequent checking than the rest.
What counts as a reply
A circuit opens over Tor to the address, and the probe waits a bounded amount of time for the service to answer at the protocol level — not for a page to fully render, just for the hidden service to respond at all. A response inside that window is a reply. Nothing inside that window is treated as silence, which becomes a Checking or Dead read depending on how many consecutive sweeps came back empty.
Why the window is bounded
An unbounded wait would let one slow or overloaded mirror stall the entire sweep, delaying the status of every other address behind it. A fixed timeout keeps the sweep's total run time predictable and keeps one struggling node from silently freezing the whole journal.
What the sweep does not do
It does not log in, does not browse past the landing response, and does not simulate a real visitor session. It is a reachability check, not a content or functionality check — a mirror can answer the probe and still have a broken checkout or an expired session layer behind it, which this page cannot see.
What each status word means
Checking
The Mars address answered the last probe, or has not yet failed enough consecutive sweeps to be marked down. This is a live-but-unconfirmed read, not a green light — treat it as "no evidence of trouble yet," never as "verified safe."
Dead
The Mars address has failed enough consecutive sweeps in a row that it is retired from the active rotation and shown struck through on the Mars mirror list. A Dead mark is sticky: it does not silently reactivate if one later sweep happens to get a reply, since a single answer after a long silence is as likely to be a fluke as a real recovery.
Primary, failover, mirror, legacy
These are roles, not status words. Primary is the Mars address meant to be tried first. Failover entries exist specifically for when the primary Mars address does not answer. Mirror is an additional working address outside that priority order. Legacy marks an address that used to be valid and is kept visible, struck through, specifically so it stays recognizable as retired instead of just vanishing and confusing anyone who bookmarked it.
What no status word here means
Notice there is no "Verified", "Official", or "100% Uptime" label anywhere on this page. Those words describe a promise this journal cannot make. A probe result is a moment-in-time reachability read, and the PGP fingerprint — not the status word — is what actually vouches for an address being genuine.
What this Mars market status page cannot tell you
A reachability sweep is a narrow instrument, and being honest about its limits matters as much as reporting what it does show. This page cannot tell you whether the Mars market checkout is currently functioning, whether a specific vendor's listings are live, or whether an order placed right now will process normally — it only confirms that a hidden service answered a Tor circuit within a bounded timeout.
A reachable Mars market node can still be broken behind the login
The probe stops at "the service responded." It does not attempt a login, does not browse listings, and does not simulate a real Mars market session. A node can read Checking here and still have an expired session layer, a broken payment flow, or other issues invisible to a reachability-only check.
Why this journal will not add a "fully operational" badge
Adding a stronger claim than the probe actually supports would make this page less honest, not more useful. The gap between "answers a Tor circuit" and "fully operational marketplace" is real, and collapsing it into one green badge is exactly the kind of overstatement this journal is built to avoid.
Reading probe history and false-dead readings, in depth
A single Checking or Dead pill is a snapshot. The two panels below cover how to read a run of readings over time, and the specific reasons a live Mars mirror can still show Dead on a given pass.
Reading a probe history instead of a single reading
Any one probe pass is a coin flip compared to a pattern across several passes. A mirror that flips between Checking and Dead every other sweep is telling you something different than one that has read Dead consistently for days — the first looks like network flakiness or a host under intermittent load, the second looks like an address that is actually gone. Neither state deserves a hard-coded "online" label, which is exactly why this console never shows one: a probe result is honest only if it stays this narrow.
The probe itself is a simple reachability check over Tor — it asks whether the address answers within a timeout window, not whether the market's application layer is fully healthy behind it. That means a mirror can read Checking while the underlying Mars deployment is degraded in ways the probe cannot see (a broken login flow, a stuck database, a partial outage of one section of the market), and conversely a mirror can occasionally misread Dead due to a single slow Tor circuit even though the service is fine. Treat a single pass as a hint and a multi-pass pattern as the actual signal.
Context matters too: a wave of Dead readings across several unrelated Mars mirrors at the same time more often points at a Tor network-wide slowdown or a shared hosting incident than at every address failing independently and coincidentally. A single mirror going Dead while its siblings stay Checking points the other way — toward something specific to that one address, worth treating with more suspicion until it either recovers or gets formally retired to Legacy.
Why a live Mars mirror can still show Dead on this page
The most common cause is timing: this page reflects the last completed sweep, not the current second, so a mirror that came back online forty seconds after the last probe pass will still show its previous Dead reading until the next scheduled check runs. If the stamp at the top of this page is older than the probe interval, treat the whole reading as stale rather than authoritative.
The second cause is circuit-level noise inherent to Tor itself. A probe that builds a slow three-hop circuit and hits a congested relay can legitimately time out against a perfectly healthy hidden service on the other end — this is a property of the Tor network's variable latency, not a defect in either the probe or the mirror. A single false Dead reading from circuit noise is expected background behavior, not a sign anything is actually broken.
The third cause is descriptor propagation lag after a rotation. When a Mars mirror publishes a new or updated hidden service descriptor, it takes time to propagate across the distributed hash table that Tor clients query to resolve onion addresses. A probe that queries before propagation completes gets a "not found" result indistinguishable from the address being genuinely offline. This is one reason a freshly rotated mirror is worth re-checking a few sweeps later rather than writing off after one Dead reading.
None of these explanations should be read as "ignore a Dead reading" — they explain why a single pass can be wrong in the address's favor, not why you should trust an address the signed canon does not list. A Dead reading is still the honest default until a probe actually confirms otherwise.
Status questions
Is the Mars market down right now?
This page cannot answer live. It shows what the last automated sweep saw. Read the sweep timestamp: a state is a past reading, not this second.
How often does the probe run?
Roughly once every half hour. The stamp at the top shows the last completed pass, so the numbers age until the next sweep lands.
A node shows dead. Is it gone for good?
Not always. Dead means the last knock got no reply inside the timeout. Addresses rotate and nodes flap, so re-check it against the signed set before you write it off.
Why is no Mars market node ever marked online?
There is no hard-coded green light. A node reads Checking until a live probe backs it, and even an answering node still owes you a signature check.