Beyond_Earth-_A_Chronicle_of_Deep_Space_Exploration_1958-2016.pdf

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Zond 8

Nation: USSR (74)

Objective(s): circumlunar flight

Spacecraft: 7K-L1 (no. 14)

Spacecraft Mass: c. 5,375 kg

Mission Design and Management: TsKBEM

Launch Vehicle: Proton-K + Blok D (8K82K no. 250-01 + 11S824 no. 21L)

Launch Date and Time: 20 October 1970 / 19:55:39 UT

Launch Site: NIIP-5 / Site 81/23

Scientific Instruments:

• 1. solar wind collector packages
• 2. imaging system

Results: Zond 8 was the last in the series of circumlunar spacecraft designed to rehearse a piloted circumlunar flight. The project was initiated in 1965 to compete with the Americans in the race to the Moon, but lost its importance once three astronauts circled the Moon on the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968. After a mid-course correction on 22 October at distance of 250,000 kilometers from Earth, Zond 8 reached the Moon without any apparent problems, circling its target on 24 October at a range of 1,110 kilometers. The spacecraft took black-and-white photographs of the lunar surface during two separate sessions. (Earlier, it took pictures of Earth during the outbound flight at a distance of 65,000 kilometers). After two mid-course corrections on the return leg, Zond 8 achieved a return trajectory over Earth's northern hemisphere instead of the standard southern approach profile, allowing Soviet ground control stations to maintain near-continuous contact with the craft. The guidance system, however, malfunctioned on the return leg, and the spacecraft performed a simple ballistic (instead of a guided) reentry into Earth's atmosphere. The vehicle's descent module splashed down safely in the Indian Ocean at 13:55 UT on 27 October about 730 kilometers southeast of the Chagos Islands, 24 kilometers from its original target point. Soviet recovery ships were on hand to collect it and bring it back to Moscow.

Luna 17 and Lunokhod 1

Nation: USSR (75)

Objective(s): lunar roving operations

Spacecraft: Ye-8 (no. 203)

Spacecraft Mass: 5,700 kg

Mission Design and Management: GSMZ imeni Lavochkina

Launch Vehicle: Proton-K + Blok D (8K82K no. 251-01 + 11S824 no. 406L)

Launch Date and Time: 10 November 1970 / 14:44:01 UT

Launch Site: NIIP-5 / Site 81/23

Scientific Instruments (on Lunokhod 1):

• 1. imaging system (two low resolution TV + four high resolution photometers)
• 2. RIF-MA x-ray spectrometer
• 3. PrOP penetrometer
• 4. TL-1 laser reflector
• 5. RV-2N radiation detector
• 6. RT-1 x-ray telescope
• 7. odometer/speedometer

Results: Luna 17 continued the spate of successes in Soviet lunar exploration begun by Luna 16 and Zond 8. Luna 17 carried Lunokhod 1, the first in a series of robot lunar roving vehicles, whose conception had begun in the early 1960s, originally as part of the piloted lunar landing operations. The undercarriage was designed and built by VNII Transmash although Lavochkin retained overall design conception of the vehicle. This was the second attempt to land such a vehicle on the Moon after a failure in February 1969. The descent stage was equipped with two landing ramps for the "ascent stage," i.e., the rover, to disembark on to the Moon's surface. The 756-kilogram rover stood about 1.35 meters high and was 2.15 meters across. Each of its eight wheels could be controlled independently for two forward and two reverse speeds. Top speed was about 100 meters/hour, with commands issued by a five-man team of "drivers" on Earth who had to deal with a minimum 4.1 second delay (which included the 2.6 second roundtrip of the signal plus time to exert pressure on levers on the control panel). These men were carefully selected from a pool of hundreds in a process that began as early as May 1968. Two crews, for two shifts, were selected, each comprising five men (commander, driver, flight-engineer, navigator, and narrow-beam antenna guidance operator). The commanders of these "sedentary cosmonauts," as they were called, were Yu. F. Vasil'yev and I. L. Fedorov, while the drivers were N. M. Yeremenko and V. G. Dovgan', respectively. The set of scientific instruments was powered by solar cells (installed on the inside of the hinged top lid of the rover) and chemical batteries. After two mid-course corrections en route to the Moon, Luna 17 entered an 85 × 141-kilometer lunar orbit inclined at 141°. Repeating the same dynamic descent activities as its predecessor, Luna 17 landed on the lunar surface at 03:46:50 UT on 17 November 1970 at 38° 24′ N / 34° 47′ W (as known at the time), about 2,500 kilometers from the Luna 16 site in the Sea of Rains. The lander settled in a crater-like depression 150–200 meters in diameter and 7 meters deep. As a result of Yeremenko's command, driver G. G. Latypov pushed a lever and then pressed a button to move the vehicle off its platform with a "First—Forward!" exclamation. It was 06:27:07 UT on 17 November. It took 20 seconds to roll down to the surface. During its 322 Earth days of operation, the rover traveled 10.47 kilometers (later, in 2013, revised down to 9.93 kilometers) and returned more than 20,000 TV images and 206 high resolution panoramas. In addition, Lunokhod 1 performed 25 soil analyses with its RIF-MA x-ray fluorescence spectrometer and used its penetrometer at 537 different locations over a 10.5-kilometer route (averaging one use every c. 20 meters). Lunokhod 1 also carried a 3.7-kilogram French-supplied instrument above the forward cameras, the TL-1, consisting of 14 10-centimeter silica glass prisms to bounce back pulses of ruby laser light fired from observatories in Crimea and France. Scientists first used this reflector on 5 and 6 December, allowing the Earth–Moon distance to be measured down to an accuracy of 30 centimeters. However, dust apparently covered the reflector and few further echoes were obtained. Controllers finished the last communications session with Lunokhod 1 at 13:05 UT on 14 September 1971. Attempts to reestablish contact were discontinued on 4 October, thus culminating one of the most successful robotic missions of the early space age. Lunokhod 1 clearly outperformed its expectations—its planned design life was only 3 lunar days (about 21 Earth days) but it operated for 11. Many years later, in March 2010, a team of scientists based at several U.S. academic institutions resumed laser ranging with the laser reflector on Lunokhod 1, based on data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which allowed a precise determination (to 5 meters accuracy) of the location of the (former) Soviet rover. The new data provided a more precise location for Lunokhod 1 as 38.333° N / 35.037° W. The landing site of Luna 17 was also refined to 38.238° N / 34.997° W.

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Mariner 8

Nation: USA (48)

Objective(s): Mars orbit

Spacecraft: Mariner-71H / Mariner-H

Spacecraft Mass: 997.9 kg

Mission Design and Management: NASA / JPL

Launch Vehicle: Atlas Centaur (AC-24 / Atlas 3C no. 5405C / Centaur D-1A)

Launch Date and Time: 9 May 1971 / 01:11:01 UT

Launch Site: Cape Kennedy / Launch Complex 36A

Scientific Instruments:

• 1. imaging system
• 2. ultraviolet spectrometer
• 3. infrared spectrometer
• 4. infrared radiometer

Results: Mariner-71H (also called Mariner-H) was the first of a pair of American spacecraft intended to explore the physical and dynamic characteristics of Mars from Martian orbit. The overall goals of the series were: to search for an environment that could support life; to collect data on the origins and evolution of the planet; to gather information on planetary physics, geology, planetology, and cosmology; and to provide data that could aid future spacecraft such as the Viking landers. Launch of Mariner-71H was nominal until just after separation of the Centaur upper stage when a malfunction occurred in the stage's flight control system leading to loss of pitch control at an altitude of 148 kilometers at T+4.7 minutes. As a result, the stack began to tumble and the Centaur engines shut down. The stage and its payload reentered Earth's atmosphere approximately 1,500 kilometers downrange from the launch site, about 400 kilometers north of Puerto Rico. The problem was traced to a failed integrated circuit in the pitch guidance module.

Kosmos 419 [Mars]

Nation: USSR (76)

Objective(s): Mars orbit

Spacecraft: M-71S (3MS no. 170)

Spacecraft Mass: 4,549 kg

Mission Design and Management: GSMZ imeni Lavochkina

Launch Vehicle: Proton-K + Blok D (8K82K no. 253-01 + 11S824 no. 1101L)

Launch Date and Time: 10 May 1971 / 16:58:42 UT

Launch Site: NIIP-5 / Site 81/23

Scientific Instruments:

• 1. fluxgate magnetometer
• 2. infrared radiometer
• 3. infrared photometer
• 4. RIEP-2801 multi-channel plasma spectrometer
• 5. visible photometer
• 6. radiometer
• 7. ultraviolet photometer
• 8. cosmic ray detector
• 9. D-127 charged particle traps
• 10. imaging system (with Vega and Zufar cameras)
• 11. Stéréo-1 radio-astronomy experiment

Results: Kosmos 419 was the first "fifth generation" Soviet Mars probe (after those launched in 1960, 1962, 1963-64, and 1969). The original plan was to launch two orbiter-lander combinations known as M-71 during the 1971 Mars launch period, but in order to preempt the American Mariner H/I vehicles, Soviet planners added a third mission, the M-71S, a simple orbiter that could become the first spacecraft to go into orbit around Mars. The orbiter could also collect data important for aiming the two landers at precise locations on the Martian surface. These new vehicles were the first Soviet robotic spacecraft to have digital computers (the S-530), which was a simplified version of the Argon-11 carried on the 7K-L1 ("Zond") circumlunar spacecraft. The first of these Mars spacecraft entered Earth orbit successfully (145 × 159 kilometers at 51.5° inclination), but the Blok D upper stage failed to fire the second time to send the spacecraft to Mars. Later investigation showed that there had been human error in programming the firing time for the Blok. Apparently, the timer that would ignite the Blok D was incorrectly programmed to fire after 150 hours instead of 1.5 hours. (One report claimed that a programmer incorrectly programmed the time in years instead of hours). The stranded spacecraft, which was named Kosmos 419 by the Soviet press, reentered Earth's atmosphere within two days of launch. The Soviets had promised the French that two of their Stéréo-1 instruments would be sent to Mars during the 1971 window, but since one was lost on Kosmos 419 which had officially nothing to do with a Mars mission, Soviet officials were forced to keep silent about its fate.

Mars 2

Nation: USSR (77)

Objective(s): Mars orbit and landing

Spacecraft: M-71 (4M no. 171)

Spacecraft Mass: 4,650 kg

Mission Design and Management: GSMZ imeni Lavochkina

Launch Vehicle: Proton-K + Blok D (8K82K no. 255-01 + 11S824 no. 1201L)

Launch Date and Time: 19 May 1971 / 16:22:49 UT

A ground model of the PrOP-M mobile device that was installed on the Soviet Mars landers for the 1971 missions. These were capable of moving 15 meters away from the lander while hooked to a tether. Credit: T. Varfolomeyev

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Launch Site: NIIP-5 / Site 81/24

Scientific Instruments:

Orbiter:

• 1. infrared bolometer (radiometer)
• 2. microwave radiometer (radiotelescope)
• 3. infrared photometer (CO2 gas absorption strips)
• 4. IV-2 interference-polarized photometer
• 5. photometer to measure brightness distribution
• 6. 4-channel UV photometer
• 7. imaging system (two cameras, each capable of 480 images)
• 8. ferrozoid tricomponent magnetometer
• 9. ion trap
• 10. RIEP-2801 spectrometer for charged particles
• 11. cosmic ray detector
• 12. radiotransmitter (for determination of structure of atmosphere through refraction)
• 13. D-127 charged particle traps [unconfirmed]

Lander:

• 1. gamma-ray spectrometer
• 2. x-ray spectrometer
• 3. thermometer
• 4. anemometer
• 5. barometer
• 6. imaging system (2 cameras)
• 7. mass spectrometer
• 8. penetrometer (on PrOP-M)
• 9. gamma-ray densitometer (on PrOP-M)