It was produced by Everett Rosenthal, with a screenplay by Mike St. Clair from a story by Aubrey Wisberg, and directed by Nick Webster.

On their way to Mars, the American astronauts encounter the drifting bodies of two Soviet cosmonauts, who they realize must have been buried in space.

They also discover a third cosmonaut, standing frozen in a state of suspended animation, who revives once brought inside the American spacecraft.

The astronauts then encounter a strange creature (called a "Polarite"), which threatens them but which they neutralize by firing beam weapons at its single red eye.

[1][2] Science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl stated in his book The Spacesuit Film that Mission Mars "devolves into a conventional monster movie.