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Just like our own, the Soviet Robotic and Lunar and Planetary Exploration Program
grew out of the Cold War.
It was enabled of coursed by essentially ICBMs.
Unlike ours however, it nearly died with the former Soviet Union
and it provided all along a kind of a mysterious and sinister stimulus of American efforts on this side
because for the most part we didn’t know what they were doing
and they had a habit earlier in the days beating us to places.
So it really kind of booted us in the rear end to make sure we did everything we could
to get on top of it and through the course of most events in this program
were unknown and hidden in veil of secrecy until about the mid-1980s.
Most of the events in fact are virtually unknown
outside of a very closed circle in Soviet secrecy.
And all of that has really changed because the fact is this tale of a lot of adventure,
excitement, a lot of suspense in this mission, a lot of tragedy.
It is a very human story about a the courage of lot of people, patience to overcome obstacles
that we’ve never heard of and a lot of failures, in fact.
But despite all that, it’s also a tale of fantastic accomplishments as well as debilitating loss
and the Russian people didn’t get to live this, we can only hear about it after the fact.
This whole program in the Soviet Union was driven by a thirst for technical achievements
and desire for international recognition and respect back in the late '50s and '60s
and that was actually a success because in fact for robotic missions,
the Russians were the first on the moon.
They were actually the first on Venus and, less well known, they were actually the first on Mars.
Now the early years of space exploration were driven by strong personalities both here and in the Soviet Union.
Men who were visionaries, they were superb engineers, and they were strong leaders.
They all came out of the war.
In the U.S., it was Wehrner Von Braun, of course, and in the Soviet Union it was this man,
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, and he is sometimes called the mysterious "chief designer",
that was all he was known as.
It was a state secret who this man was
and in fact if you mentioned his name you were taken out to the forest and shot.
Like Wehrner Von Braun, he experimented with rockets in the '20s and '30s as a young man,
but he became a victim of Stalin purges in the late '30s and he was sent to a work camp,
in this case a particular kind of work camp called the sharashka,
which maintained for scientists and engineers
and they were put into forced labor to help out during World War II.
Of course his job was to work on rockets for World War II
and he emerged afterward to investigate the Germans' rocket program,
he was sent to Germany, brought back a bunch of V2s
and a bunch of German scientists
and then he personally led the Soviet Union into the age of ballistic missiles and rockets.
His real interest, just like Wehrner's, was not so much military, but in fact to explore space.
But you couldn’t do space exploration without the military’s rockets and their money.
And so to influence his government to conduct space exploration versus just building missiles,
he engaged with this other man here, Mstislav Keldysh,
and Keldysh was the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences
and he became the face of the space program in the Soviet Union
and was known generally as the Chief Theoretician and there is no equivalent here in the U.S.
Korolev is the designer of Russia’s first ICBM, he started working on this in early '50s.
It is called the R-7 and it was required to carry this massive Soviet atomic warhead
that weighed about five times more than the U.S. equivalent for the same yield.
They didn’t have the technology that we had to miniaturize these warheads.
And the result, the first Soviet rockets were much more powerful than U.S. rockets, much bigger.
Therefore, they were a great boon to space exploration payloads.
The R-7 was first tested in April 1957.
Korolev actually had to fight the army to use it during test flights to launch a satellite,
we all know which satellite that was.
He succeeded only when the development of the warheads ran behind the actual testing of the rocket.
So they had extra rockets so they said, okay why don’t you just go ahead and launch your little satellite,
then of course that was Sputnik.
And then later he had developed a three staged version called the Luna,
which was used for the very earliest Lunar missions in 1958-59.
Then a four-staged version later called the Molniya,
it was developed for planetary missions and heavier lunar flights beginning in 1963.
In the '60s, the Russians can throw about five times more weight than the equivalent U.S. vehicle.
Molniya was five times for powerful than the Atlas-Agena,
which was used back then for U.S. missions.
And the R-7, of course, became the basis for the most successful space launcher in history,
now known today as Soyuz, used for both manned and robotic launches.
Of course the world reaction to Sputnik took the Soviets completely by surprise.
Khrushchev thought this was some little sideline, okay do your thing.
And when they launched Sputnik, the world’s reaction just blew the Soviet leadership away.
And they realized immediately the propaganda value of these civil space missions
and that opened the door for Korolev’s request to use the R-7 for lunar and planetary launches.
Khrushchev actually pushed him hard, forced Korolev to rush
and prepare a spacecraft and three-stage rocket to beat the American’s announced lunar launch,
which was going to be in August 1958.
And so what Korolev did, he put his first three-stage rocket on the pad
and he listened on the radio to see how the Americans were doing.
He was ready to push the button if the U.S. launch succeeded.
It didn’t succeed, wiped his brow, took the rocket off the pad, and continued more testing.
Now it turns out throughout the whole fall of '98 the Russians and U.S. traded three launch failures.
These were Pioneers 1-3 and it was kind of dramatic contest on both sides.
The USSR was completely aware of what we were doing day by day, hour by hour,
but the U.S. was kind of groping blindly to try and seize the lead.
It had no information about whether they were or not ahead of the Soviet Union, but Korolev prevailed.
The age of robotic lunar and planetary exploration actually began
with the successful launch of Luna 1 on Jan 2, 1959, the first spacecraft to leave Earth orbit.
It was the first lunar flyby, January 4th.
Of course it was designed to actually impact the moon, but it failed doing that.
The Russians, of course, never announced that. They just said it was supposed to be a flyby.
Then later after another launch failure, the Luna 2 became the first to impact the moon on September 14, 1959.
Then Korolev built a much more capable spacecraft that was actually the very first three-axis
controlled spacecraft, the Luna 3
and then conducted a certain lunar flyby and took far side pictures in October 7, 1959.
And of course, the U.S. was still trying to get its rockets to work at that time.
Well, after the lunar success, Khrushchev pushed Korolev for more.
Korolev wanted to go to Venus and he wanted to go to Mars.
To do that he needed a new four-stage vehicle for the R-7
and he had to do all of this within eight months because Khrushchev said,
I want this by the October Revolution anniversary, the October Revolution, I got 8 months.
And Khrushchev said something that was motivating
and it is actually amazing that Korolev actually got these things built in eight months,
a brand new four-stage vehicle and a new spacecraft.
This spacecraft was the first with solar panels to recharge the batteries
because it was going a long distance, on-board propulsion, first with on-board propulsion.
It is underneath that dome that you see there, can’t see the nozzle,
but it is at the top of the dome and long range communication
with the first parabolic antenna you can see there.
It carried facsimile camera for flyby, infrared spectrometer, UV spectrometer,
all of which had to be removed in the end in order to save weight for diagnostic instruments
that Korolev had to put on the brand new launch vehicle
and the only way to carry it was space environment sensors
and the Venus one carried a small-impact probe
that was designed to save the break up the spacecraft before they even got there.
The problem is that the first launch, which you see here,
is the *** of the first Molniya on the pad,
carried a Mars spacecraft on top of it, it failed on October 10th,
and the second attempt failed on October 14th.
And then February they tried two Venus launches,
one of them was a success and in fact sent the Venera 1 on his way towards Venus,
but the spacecraft had a lot of problems
and had severe thermal and attitude control issues, and it failed five days later.
But it is the first spacecraft ever successfully launched towards a planet.
The 60-61 launches had been really rushed, in only eight months,
so Khrushchev took the next two years to improve his Molniya,
give it more lift capacity and develop a new-generation spacecraft
that was specifically designed for planetary missions with all improved systems.
It was a modular spacecraft, it had a crew stage and a science compartment.
This kind of set the design standard for planetary spacecraft for the next decade in the Soviet Union.
This is the crew's module, it contained all the avionics, navigation, and attitude control.
This is the propulsion system and below the waist here is the science compartment.
This case, this is the flyby module, solar panels, hemispherical thermal radiators, lots of antennas.
So Mars 1 and the flyby module contained the same three instruments that were tried earlier,
the camera and two spectrometers.
The entry probe module contained temperature measurements, pressure, chemical analyzer,
gamma-ray, surface analyzer, and a mercury motion detector.
The only one that succeeded in its launch vehicle was Mars 1,
it was the first spacecraft ever launched to Mars in 1962 and it suffered a lot of difficulties.
It had attitude control problems and eventually it was lost after about five months.
Well after his successes at impacting and imaging the Moon,
Korolev had stood down to develop planetary spacecrafts
and then he designed a new lunar spacecraft for soft landing.
He based that on design 2MV planetary vehicle you just saw with a crew stage and detattachable lunar lander.
The earlier Lunas flew these direct trajectories to the moon, Luna’s 1 through 3.
This one used a new four-staged Molniya so what they did was just park it in Earth orbit
in 4th stage and then at the right moment, just like we do now,
ignite the fourth stage for a second time to send it on to planetary trajectory,
much more efficient way of doing things.
The lander carried only two instruments;
panoramic scanning photometer for imaging and radiation detector.
It had no solar panels, it had all batteries, 100 kilograms soft landers, and it used air bags for terminal shock.
another country stole that idea a couple decades later, but boy did they have problems with this.
They had 11 failed missions over two years, '63 to '65.
That’s a record of failures that would of failed NASA.
In fact, JPL if you remember had like six or seven failures in the Ranger Program
and they almost lost their contract.
So 11 was not good, it called in front of Khrushchev, got his finger waved in his face,
but he just kept trying and that as a characteristic of the Russian program.
They just kept trying and made it work.
Luna 4 actually got launched to the moon, but its navigation failed and it missed the moon.
Luna 5, its guidance failed, crashed. Luna 6 mid-course awry, missed the moon.
Luna 7 had attitude control problems and its retro system failed and it crashed.
Luna 8, when it approached the moon
and deployed the lander, the air bag was punctured and it crashed, not a good record.
In addition to frustration at the moon during these years,
the Soviets were again frustrated at Mars and Venus.
The lessons from Mars 1 forced a complete redesign of the 2MV spacecraft,
it became known now as the 3MV, the third Mars-Venus spacecraft.
And the reliability of the fourth stage was increased and to test all these things, the Molniya and spacecraft,
they planned test flights, which seems to be a good thing to do,
but these just revealed more and more problems so they tried a test flight November 11 of the Mars Vehicle.
Mars wasn’t there, but they were just going to send it the Mars distance to test it, that launched failed.
In February of ’64, they tried to test launch the Venus distance, that also failed,
but the problem was the Venus window was upon them.
And so they just went ahead and tried to launch, this time to Venus.
Their first launched failed.
The second one succeeded, but the spacecraft had problems.
It developed a slow leak in the pressurized compartments,
so much mass they didn’t have to worry about developing back in electronics.
They just built a pressurized module.
And they realized it was not going to fulfill its mission
so they named it Zond 1 instead of Venus 2.
Later in the year, they tried a Mars flyby launch, it succeeded,
but the spacecraft failed again after two months, due to multiple problems.
And then they said, okay were having so many problems we’ll try another test launch.
So in 1965 they tried a test launch to Mars again, [inaudible],
the launch succeeded and during the flyby of the moon,
they wanted to test all the instruments out and how the spacecraft worked at the time.
That all went just fine and Zond 3 returned with a lot of images of the far side of the moon
and it survived for eight months, but it didn’t quite make it the Mars distance.
And then finally later on 1965, they tried three launches at Venus, two of which were successful.
Venus 2 and Venus 3 came that close to fulfilling their mission.
The Venus probe, the Venera 3, they both had thermal problems going inwards toward the sun
and Venus 3 got to the planet just 17 days before it was to get there, simply due to thermal issues.
Venera 2 actually made it to the planet and initiated its flyby sequence
and then was never heard from again, tantalizingly close, frustrating losses,
but encouraging enough to lead them to try an attempt the next opportunity.
Korolev’s design year was called OKB-1, was responsible at this time for both human and robotic programs.
He had the whole enchilada, he was almost like NASA
and by 1965 he was almost completely occupied with the human space flight program
and he had this long string of failures in the robotic program.
And he realized he just couldn’t do both and so he reluctantly transferred responsibility
for the robotic lunar and planetary program to his good friend, Gregory Babakin’s Institute -- Lavochkin,
where it remains today and he did that kind of in mid-1965.
What they did was, they took the year of 1965 to modify,
OKB-1's lunar spacecraft and then on their very first try early in 1966,
after all those failures, they succeeded, unfortunately only days after Korolev’s death.
Korolev died in January of 1966.
Although the Soviets were lagging at Mars and Venus, they once again beat the U.S. to a space milestone.
The Luna 9 was the first soft landing on the moon
and the first to return panoramic pictures from the surface.
Survyeor 1 followed later in June 1966 and Luna 13 in December.
Well anxious to beat Americans to lunar orbit,
after having landed softly, the Americans announced they were going to do this is in mid-1966.
So the Soviets quickly cobbled together an orbiter from the Luna 9, 13 vehicle.
They simply used the crew stage and replaced the lander
with a pressurized module containing readily available instruments they could use.
This was probably from a Kosmo-Earth satellite series somewhere.
And after one failure in March, they finally succeeded a month later with Luna 10.
U.S. Lunar Orbiter 1 followed in August, so they did beat the U.S. to orbit,
but the U.S. took the first lunar images in orbit and this was the first evidence
that the U.S. was beginning to catch up.
The U.S. finally succeeded with the first milestone.
Lavochkin built an improved series beginning with the Luna 11.
These were the imagers. The imager failed on Luna 11,
but it did succeed on Luna 12 and that series was quite successful actually
in mapping the lunar environment and obtaining data for the manned space program.
The real purpose of this series, Luna 11 through 14,
was to map lunar gravity cause it was very rugged.
They were actually were the first to detect mascons.
They lost credit for it because they didn’t publish it, the U.S. got credit for that.
They did radiation and magnetic field mapping,
they looked at Cosmonaut landing sites with imagery,
and they did a lot of technology tests for the piloted program.
They were testing lubricants for vacuum use in space and those such things.
Well during the same time period as these new lunar successes were occurring,
Lavochkin made significant improvement to Korolev’s 3MV planetary spacecraft as well
and they beefed up the probe to handle a Venus pressure of 18 atmospheres
and about 400 degrees C because some of the data from Venera 2
and ground-based experiments showed Venus probably had a hot surface, but it was controversial still.
The good thing was they were rewarded once again, immediately with their success.
The Venera 4 became the first spacecraft to penetrate the Venetian atmosphere.
You can see the spacecraft here, the same 3MV design,
here is the avionic sensors on the back here,
the parabolic antenna, solar panels, propulsion system up here, this is the crew stage, and this is the probe.
Here is the probe with the top half of the ablation field of the moon
and this is the parachute cover and this is the probe contained inside, including the radio altimeter here.
The controversy, its last measured temperature was 262 degrees C. Some time later [inaudible].
The last pressure measured was 18 bar, which was its design limit
and there was some confusion at the time of whether or not it actually hit the surface
and the altimeter did not actually work properly, it seem to indicate that they had been at the surface
and there was a conflicting interpretation of these terrestrial data
and the Mariner 2 data on Venus and it wasn’t settled yet.
It was finally reconciled by the Mariner 5 in 1967,
but this controversy was not settled in time for the next Venera series, 5 and 6,
but in any case they did manage to strengthen the probe to about 25 bars
and smaller chutes to get the spacecraft to the ground quicker before the temperature got too high.
Venera 5 and 6 were both successful,
but they also imploded at their design limit, about 25 bars, 27 bars.
Here is the data that they received.
The surprise was that Venus did not actually have a lot of nitrogen,
it was not water, it was entirely CO2.
So little oxygen and water and these were the temperatures that rise at the surface
by using an atmospheric module for Mariner 5 and Venera 5 and 6 data.
Well in 1966, actually going back here a little bit, Lavochkin,
we're going back to Mars here,
Lavochkin decided to abandon this 3MV vehicle for Mars
because it had so many failures and not one of them had even come close
to meeting its objectives as opposed to Venus.
So they opted to go for a new and heavy spacecraft, 5 metric tons,
launched by this new Proton vehicle
and Mariner 4 had also shown the atmosphere was very, very thin, which was a surprise.
So that means it required a whole new type of lander than the one they were trying to use,
the one they were trying to use totally failed.
And what they did was they sat down and devised a whole new comprehensive plan
for both Mars and Venus and the goal was soft landing.
The U.S. was just doing flybys back in those days and so they defined the 1969 campaign,
to get on the atmosphere that they needed to design this new lander
to get the ephemeris data on Mars so they can actually target the lander properly.
And this whole program was also designed to upstage the Mariner ’69 flyby
and upstage the ’71 orbiters by landing.
And this was a brand new heavy design for Proton, three-year development challenge,
three years is kind of standard for us if you want remember,
and all of this was diverted by the rush to succeed at Venus as well in ‘67.
At first, they tried to design a spacecraft based on a lunar design they had.
The main problem in designing a robotic lunar spacecraft to land a rover for cosmonaut purposes, I’ll get to that in a second.
They tried modifying that spacecraft for Mars
and after a year and a half they decided that was just not going to work, they just couldn’t do that,
they needed a different design for Mars.
And so with 13 months left to go, they totally redesigned the entire spacecraft
and ended up with a 3500 kilogram orbiter with a 300 kilogram probe.
The probe was to be deployed from orbit and unfortunately since they had so little time
they had a lot of mass problems,
they had a lot of testing time problems so they just deleted the probe and bolted on some orbiter instruments.
The problem is both Protons exploded on them in March 27, 1969, the third stage,
it exploded shortly after ignition and the second booster exploded.
Now the U.S. has been tracking the Russian’s spacecraft since the 60s
and generally could tell where these things were going after launch because they tracked them.
These they weren’t able to track because they were lost so early in their flights
so the purpose of these launches went unknown.
So they didn’t have a clue that they were actually trying to go to Mars back then.
It was such a capable mission, it would have scared us to death given what we were trying to do just to do a flyby.
Well, in fact the launch failure probably saved the Russians the embarrassment
because the spacecraft was so rushed, it would have had many problems.
Well I mentioned the cosmonaut program and the rovers.
In late ’68, early ’69, the U.S. closed in on the manned landing on the moon,
the Soviet Union decided to counter with robotic missions
because they pretty soon realized that they were way too far behind.
And they had in development this new Proton-launched heavy lunar spacecraft designed to land a large rover.
The purpose of that rover was to actually go first before the cosmonauts to scout out the site,
act as a beacon to guide the landing off of the cosmonauts,
and to provide safe conduct to an earlier spacecraft
that had landed robotically as an escape route in case something happened to the vehicle of the cosmonaut.
And so what Lavochkin did was adapt this design for robotic missions specifically
constructed around four large propellant tanks,
it had lander gear with egress ramps for the rover, it had these backpacks,
these dettachable backpacks to carry propellant, batteries, and avionics,
and this was to be jettisoned in lunar orbit after it had its final orbit before landing.
In an effort to upstage the U.S. Apollo 11, they rapidly modified this for a sample return.
They added an avionics ring for the sample device, this is a sampler,
and then they added the sample return stage.
They designed a very ingenious return trajectory for specific landing sites on the surface
with proper timing eliminated completely the need for any complex return navigation
or any need for mid-course direction at all.
We launch at the right time, it landed on the earth.
The soviets were very, very clever with navigation, very, very innovative.
Work began on this sample return modification late in 1968
and it’s just amazing that such a complex spacecraft can be so readily modified in so incredibly short of time.
And it actually flew after the first rover attempt failed in February ’69.
All of this is a testament to Russian culture.
Their attitude was just do it, dismiss the hardships, forget about that stuff,
use whatever you have on hand, fix it on the fly while your building and after the build,
order a rocket from the army, erect it, put your spacecraft on it, light the fuse.
That is the way they worked and their rockets were readily at hand.
The Samara factory was turning out R-7s in Ford assembly line production fashion.
Called the army and got one, very different than today.
Well, after one launch failure in June 15,
Luna 15 reached lunar orbit before Apollo 11 got there
and it failed on July 13 attempting to land while the Apollo astronauts were still on the surface.
Sample return and lunar sample return, lunar rovers,
are robotic achievements that have never been equal by the U.S.
The rovers were loaded with instrumentation. The included a whole set of panoramic cameras
to get the complete 180-degree vertical view around the rover.
This is a picture from the vertical one of these.
These are segments taken from the horizontal 360-degree horizontal panoramic view they would get.
They also had two stereo pair cameras that are on the back and front to help the drivers.
You can see here, this is Lunokhod 2 and this is a picture it took from its lander
and here is a recent picture from the lunar orbiter , you can kind of see the ramp here,
the tracks of the rover, and this picture was taken from this station right here.
Both rovers were superb achievements.
Lunokhod 1 traveled over 10.5 kilometers in 10 months.
Lunokhod 2 traveled 37 kilometers in 4 months.
Both were spectacular successes and they turned a whole lot of data on lunar surface environment,
soil composition & mechanics, dust, magnetic field and local geology.
Well, the sample return missions were successful too.
They had a few more failures in these, but they had a number of successes as well.
In 1970 on the 24th of September Luna 16 became the first successful robotic sample return mission from the moon.
It returned a 101 grams of the sample core.
This is a diagram of the vehicle, this is the arm of the sampler, this it deployed on the surface,
that is the drill core, and then it would swing back up,
turn around a little bit and put the sample inside a door here,
the door would close, and at the right moment they would launch this bit back to the earth.
And here is the picture of the first return core right here
and again this is a picture from LRO of Luna 16 sitting on the surface here.
1971 they did it again, they tried Luna 18 and it ran out of fuel at just about 100 meters altitude and crashed.
Somebody forgot to fill the tanks up.
In 1972, Luna 20 succeeded, it returned 55 grams, it had some trouble with the drill.
In 1974, Luna 23 landed very hard and damaged its sampler so no return was attempted.
Finally in 1976, Luna 24 with an improved drill returned about 170 grams
and with Luna 24, 1976, Soviet exploration of the moon ended.
After the success with the Luna 16 sample return and the Luna 17 rover,
the Soviets once again modified the spacecraft and replaced a top portion of it with an orbiting compartment.
The objectives were tied to the lunar cosmonaut program at the time.
The goals for these were to obtain surface imaging at very high resolution,
100 meters by 400 meters pixels,
to obtain altimetry measurements of lunar topography for cosmonaut landing sites
to do remote surface composition and dielectric properties of the surface
and map the lunar gravity field even more accurately,
to get radiation, plasma, data on the environment in lunar orbit.
And both were successful, but there were very few results that were published
and I think that is because of its tie to the cosmonaut program.
And we all know eventually the Soviet program, landing cosmonauts on the moon,
was finally terminated in the mid-1970s.
Back to Venus now.
So after eleven attempts in almost ten years, we finally achieved success at Venus with the Venera 7.
The Venera 7 capsule had been beefed up once we knew about surface conditions.
They beefed up the Venera 7 capsule to handle 180 atmospheres of pressure
to ensure that this was going to last and 540 C for 90 minutes.
That takes mass so in order to do that they had to sacrifice most of the payload.
There is only a pressure sensor and a temperature sensor, the altimeter, and a simple gamma-ray spectrometer on board.
Of course, you get the Doppler winds for free cause of the radio.
And they use a much smaller chute, cutting down the size of the chute,
much smaller chute to get to the surface as quick as possible and maximize the time on the surface.
And what happened though was the parachute ripped and then it failed after a while
and it dropped the capsule and the capsule hit very, very hard.
And the single all but disappeared at impact, but what was interesting is of course the spacecraft and this is the landing capsule.
And you can see here this is from the data, you can see here the parachute was deployed right about here
and right about here they unreef it, it was a reefed parachute and then the parachute ripped right here.
And this big streaming parachute goes behind the vehicle
and went into kind of swoop and glide oscillations.
Then right here, the parachute failed
and free fell to the surface, hit the surface, and then you hear all the static.
Well, one engineer spent his holidays, his Christmas and New Years holidays
looking at data and he found, oh yeah there is a little signal in there.
And sure enough, there was about 23 minutes worth of signal there from the surface.
Apparently, the lander had bounced
and was tilted over so the antenna was not pointed towards Earth,
but they did get enough signal to get some data back.
The other unfortunate thing is that the instrument commutator had failed
and we only got temperature data along with Doppler.
And so the next opportunity, they sent Venera 8 this time to the day side.
All these missions had been sent to the dark side because that is the easiest thing to do,
but they had ideas of sending a much more capable lander
and they needed information on the surface illumination to see if they could take pictures from the surface.
So they sent Venera 8 to the twilight side to get data on the visibility of the surface
and now they knew what the surface was like, they backed off,
and decided for 105 bars they had a lot more instruments
and a deployable antenna to throw off the top of the capsule and make sure they got the data.
And it was a complete success.
They got profiles of temperature, pressure, and wind.
They got solar flux from the altitude all the way to the surface,
they identified three different cloud layers in the upper atmosphere of Venus,
they measured the atmosphere composition to precision,
and they measured 93 bars and 470 degree C at the surface,
we got some gamma ray surface composition.
Okay now were going to hop back to Mars again, that is the way they kind of do this.
The opportunities come along and you go where you can.
So for 1971, the Soviets completely trashed the Mars '69 design.
Now they could take the time to design a proper spacecraft
and this complete re-design ended up being a 3440 kilogram orbiter
with a 1210 kilogram entry vehicle and 360 kilogram lander.
And the problem was they had failed to get the atmosphere data they need to design this thing in ’69
and they had failed to get the ephemeris data, but what they did do
was they just read the literature on the Mariner 6 and 7 and that is how they got their atmospheric data.
And then all this was published and it was enough for them to design this EDL system,
but the U.S.- this was in the bad old days with Brezhnev - they would not release the ephemeris, that was engineering data.
And so they decided early on to send an early orbiter before the landing spacecraft
and the orbiter would get there, get into orbit and it would act as a beacon to help the guide the later spacecraft,
which would launch the landers.
Well they knew they had problems with Mars spacecraft in the past
so they had a backup system and it was a very clever, but also very risky system.
It required on-board, automatic optical navigation for the spacecraft
without any help from the controllers, it could sense where the planet was, do its optical navigation.
The computer would then design the mid-course maneuver two days out from Mars and do the crash landing.
And it was a good thing because that pathfinder orbiter launch
was a failure and almost miraculously, this optical navigation scheme, really worked, almost perfectly.
The U.S. didn’t do anything like this for decades
and of course this was all done without our knowing how these things we accomplished.
This is the spacecraft here, there are all designed around the propulsion system.
These are the propulsion tanks and the propulsion engine is underneath this toroid, see at the bottom here.
This is an avionics toroid, it contained all the instruments,
these are optical navigation sensors, solar panels, this is the parabolic antenna,
this is the lander, this is what it looked like - familiar cone, but they had no [inaudible]
struts that kind of tied everything together.
This is the solar panels, this is the lander right here at the bottom,
this is another toroidal instrument container that also contained the parachutes
and this is propulsion system, this guy actually had a propulsion system on it,
and this is the lander, two panoramic cameras. Not shown here, but it also had a little tiny rover
and a whole set of instruments.
So it had 13 instruments on the orbiter. Eight on the lander, there were two cameras,
there was an accelerometer, pressure, temperature, wind, X-Ray spectrometer,
this little four and half kilogram walking rover called the “Marsokhodnik.”
And here is how it worked, this shows the EDL sequence for the 1971
and also the ‘73 missions, they worked exactly the same.
The orbiter was actually targeted for the orbit insertion point
and because of that the EDL system had to have a propulsion system on board so it could re-target itself for the entry cooridor.
The EDL package was deployed at about minus six hours that is six hours before MOI.
The spacecraft essentially turned to the right attitude,
released the EDL system and then the solid rocket fired on this EDL system to target the entry point,
the propulsion system was then ejected and the spacecraft reoriented itself
to entry attitude and then spun up for stability control.
Then after peak acceleration, during the entry,
it was spun down because it no longer needed to spin for stabilization at that point.
Then the descent sequence was triggered after reaching Mach 3.5
and it used a series of three chutes; pilot chute, drogue chute and reefed main chute.
Here is the reefed main right here.
Then the lander was exposed by dropping the aeroshell,
the main parachute was unreefed, exposed the retro system.
The retros were fired and the lander was dropped at about 20 meters altitude
for about 10 meters per second impact velocity.
The whole thing was amazing because the fact this whole optical navigation system scheme
worked perfectly for both Mars 2 and 3. --- had nothing to with it.
Mars 2 was unfortunately improperly targeted by the computer,
there is a story about that but I don’t have time, it was put on a too steep entry path and it crashed, but Mars 3 worked just fine.
They went through this whole EDL sequence, it landed successfully and as designed,
it turned on its transmitter 90 seconds after landing.
It transmitted to the incoming spacecraft prior to MOI,
but only 20 seconds of data after which the signal died.
And it only got 20 seconds, most of which is all noise.
The orbiters had telemetry problems, they had camera problems,
they had this big dust storm at the time and very little data came from Mars 2.
Only about 60 images came from Mars 3 and most of those were useless
because they were mostly of dust, but they did concrete data on the atmosphere’s surface
properties, gravity, and the orbital environment.
Then in 1973, this poor doomed Mars fleet - because the Soviets were aware of U.S. plans
for Viking and that the lander was more sophisticated than theirs
and they were chagrined by Mariner 9 success at the same time they had so little success in ’71.
They were still determined to beat the U.S. to the surface in 1973 and this was the period of détente.
So there was a data exchange and they got the ephemeris they needed,
but this ’73 fleet was doomed to a real failure.
They were essentially identical spacecraft to the ’71, almost virtual copies,
but the engineers substituted the new aluminum lead transistor
for the old gold lead transistor and only discovered a few months before launch that it had a short lifetime to failure.
In fact, there was a 50 percent calculated chance of failure during the flight time
of these spacecraft and this this was dictated postponement in the U.S.
The engineers argued heavily for the delay, but in this rush to beat the U.S. to the surface,
the decision makers insisted on the go-ahead.
That turned out to be a disaster.
In 1973, they could not fly orbiter-landers combinations.
For the lander, they had to do it on the flyby, not from an orbiter.
So they had to send four spacecraft, two orbiters, two flyby landers, and they all suffered the tragedy.
Mariner 4 had computer problems, it couldn’t make its second mid-course, the engine failed to fire for orbit insertion
and it simply flew past, took a few pictures, but that was it.
Mars 5, the other orbiter, it actually achieved orbit,
but at orbit insertion something happened
and it triggered a leak, so they had a pressurization failure
and the spacecraft died after 14 days and there were simply no results.
Now there was no orbiter around the planet to relay data from the landers that were coming in.
Fortunately they did a design a new radio system, a seperate radio system,
where the flyby spacecraft would get data from the lander just after landing and that system worked.
Mars 6, it conducted just an amazing flight.
I mean after its first midcourse it suffered failures, like every one of these things did,
and the downlink failed. The Russians had no idea if the spacecraft was still there, still working.
So they just sent commands to it blind, hoping it was still there, hoping it was still working.
The spacecraft did it’s navigation automatically, it did its second mid-course all by itself,
the Soviets knew nothing about it, couldn’t know anything about it, no downlink.
Then it made its third mid-course direction using the optical navigation system at Mars, all by itself.
The first time the Russian knew that Mars 6 was a success was when they started getting transmissions back
from the probe on descent. So the descent sequence worked.
This is just a monumental achievement of autonomy, it’s just amazing,
but they lost signal from the lander just as it was released.
I know it reached a fairly high velocity so it is probably no surprise.
Mars 7, its entry system simply did not fire the retro and it missed the planet.
They did get some descent data from Mars 6.
Its transmission was garbled because of a problem with the transistor and some temperature,
some pressure data, but nothing very much. Mars 5, they got some data on the environment
and some imagery on 4 and 5, but very little results from a huge, massive investment, it’s really a shame.
You know I have gone through about 50 minutes here
and I have only gotten to 1974,
but I have to tell you the first part of the Soviet enterprise
was probably the most dramatic and most interesting.
I think I can probably stop here and the rest of the story is simply they had a great success
at Venus beginning with their Veneras, Veneras 9 and 10.
They had great success later with Vega spacecraft, which went to Venus,
dropped the balloon, dropped the lander, and it went on to Halley, was huge international success.
They had an open call for instruments on the spacecraft.
It was highly unprecedented at this closed society,
it was a preview of perestroika and they became the leaders in the '80s
for the national robotic planetary exploration
because they had these big heavy spacecrafts that could offer hundreds of kilograms of space
for people who wanted to fly instruments on and they flew to Christmas trees - 13, 14, 15 instruments.
They were just massive spacecraft, 5 and 6 metric tons.
U.S. could not compete with them, they simply could just not compete.
The problem was it all came a cropper later in 1989 with another Phobos,
another international call, big international cooperation,
this time even with Western instruments aboard. And both these two missions failed.
Phobos 2 at the planet, before it got the photos.
So in the 1980s the Russians demonstrated how to do an international flight program.
It also demonstrated how debilitating these losses can be to the international community if they didn’t work.
Then there is the Mars ’96 story, which I think most of you know,
another disaster for the Russians,
but all and all their program was very exciting, very bold, far bolder than the U.S. was.
The U.S. was much more conservative.
They went step by step by step by step and the Russians, partly in order to try and beat the U.S.
and demonstrate their own technical prowess,
tripped over themselves quite a lot in the beginning of the late 1980s,
but that is another story.
Thanks for listening.