Campaign objectives

Mankind’s first venture to the planets began in I960, known only to those in the Soviet Union who performed the task and to the elite in the American spy services. The first Mars space flight campaign consisted of two identical spacecraft built for flyby exploration of the planet. They were launched in October 1960 and preceded the first US attempt at Mars by four years. Two similar spacecraft for Venus were launched in February 1961. These four spacecraft were the first designed to directly investigate our neighboring planets.

Chief Designer and Academician S. P. Korolev began work on Mars and Venus missions at OKB-1 in late 1958, during a hectic time in w’hich not only was his R-7 ICBM being developed and tested but also the second silo-based R-9ICBM. Despite flight tests often occurring at a rate of several per month, he worked on adapting the R-7 for the non-military space exploration role that had always been his dream. He created a small third stage to attain Earth escape velocity, and was ready for the first lunar launch attempts in late 1958. With the successful impact of Luna 2 and far side photography of Luna 3 in 1959, the objectives of the initial lunar spacecraft series were satisfied and Korolev was able to move on to Mars and Venus. He had planned to use an upgraded form of the third stage of the R-7F Luna launcher for planetary spacecraft later in 1959 and 1960, but the Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences convinced him that a four-stage rocket would be much more efficient and robust. When American plans for a Venus launch w ere postponed to 1962, Korolev decided to skip the 1959 60 planetary window s in order to gain the time to develop a four-stage R-7 that would have a third stage derived from the R-9 second stage and a wholly new’ fourth stage with a restartable engine. The first three stages and the initial burn of the fourth stage w ould insert the fourth stage into a low’ orbit around Earth. At the appropriate time, the fourth stage would restart to gain the desired interplanetary trajectory and release its payload. This 8K78 vehicle became known as the ‘Molniya’ launcher. It was capable of sending 1.5 tons to the Moon or just over 1 ton to either Mars or Venus.

In early January 1960, Khrushchev aired his concern about the growing US space program at a meeting with Korolev and other space leaders. Pushed by his political master to send a spacecraft to Mars, by the end of February Korolev had a schedule for launching to Mars in that fall. His team balked at the 8-month timescale because the four-stage R-7 was still a ‘paper’ vehicle and the spacecraft was not yet designed there were not even any working drawings. By today’s standards the schedule was ludicrous, but Korolev and his team had, as they put it "a fervent desire to beat the Americans…and were in a desperate hurry’7

The 1M (Mars) and IV (Venus) spacecraft originally envisioned in 1958 were far more complex than the Luna missions. They were fully З-axis stabilized spacecraft with attitude control and propulsion systems, solar arrays and battery power, thermal control, and long range communications. Korolev’s plan called for three

launches in the Mars window to dispatch two flyby spacecraft and one lander, with the optimum date being September 27. A lander had to undertake the most difficult of planetary missions – to pass through the atmosphere, survive impact with the surface, and take photographs. But at that time information on the atmospheric properties of the tw o planets w as unreliable, particularly for Mars. Korolev assumed a surface pressure for Mars between 60 and 120 millibars, which was thin but feasible, and that Venus had an atmosphere more like Earth’s. Experiments in the summer of 1960 using the R-l 1A scientific suborbital rocket (a version of the ‘Scud’ military rocket) took test entry vehicles up an altitude of 50 km for drop tests using parachutes. But designing to the uncertainties, in so short a time, forced the engineers to give up on a lander for Mars and to settle for the simpler flyby task, and for Venus it was decided to design a probe to report on conditions in the atmosphere without the need to survive impact with the surface. Nevertheless, even these simpler missions were very challenging, not least owing to the large uncertainties in the ephemerides of the two planets, wiiich for Mars exceeded the diameter of the planet itself.

The scientific objectives for the Mars flyby spacecraft were specified by Mstislav Keldysh in a document dated March 15, 1960:

1. Photograph the planet from a range of 5.000 to 30.000 km at a surface resolution of 3 to 6 km with the coverage including of one of the polar regions

2. Coverage of the infrared C-II band in the reflection spectrum, to search for plant or other organic material on the surface

3. Research into the ultraviolet band of the Martian spectrum.

The instruments and spacecraft were rushed through development in order to meet the deadline. There were many problems at the factories. The spacecraft delivered to the launch site at the end of August were a shambles. Korolev s team worked around the clock to solve the numerous technical problems, constantly taking subsystems apart for repair and retesting. The communications system gave the most trouble. In fact, full scale integrated testing did not begin until September 27, which w? as the optimum launch date!

Korolev also raced to assemble his first four-stage R-7. The new third stage was a conversion from another vehicle, so the real task was to rapidly develop the entirely new; fourth stage with its restartable engine. The pressure on the rocket team was not eased by knowing that the first test launch would be a full-fledged attempt at Mars.

Ultimately, the payload had to be slashed in order to make mass available for test instrumentation on the new upper stage combination. The heaviest instruments – the camera, infrared spectrophotometer and ultraviolet spectrometer – were deleted. The two spacecraft did not reach the launch pad until well after the optimum launch date, which meant they would not be able to approach as close to Mars as intended. But in the event this w as of no consequence because they w ere both victims of their launch vehicles.

Had these Mars spacecraft and the Venus spacecraft in February 1961 succeeded, then the world w’ould have been treated to a spectacular planetary exploration coup in May 1961. The Venus probes would have arrived at their destination on May 11

1M No. l [Mars 1960Л. Marsnik 1]

Mars Flyby USSR OKB-1 Molniya

October 10. 1960 at 14:27:49 UT (Baikonur) Launch failure, third stage malfunction.

1M No.2 [Mars 1960B. Marsnik 2]

Mars Flyby USSR OKB-1 Molniya

October 14. 1960 at 13:51:03 UT (Baikonur) Launch failure, third stage did not ignite.

and 19. and the Mars flybys would have occurred on May 13 and 15. Following only one month after Gagarin’s orbital flight in April, the effect of these triumphs on the West would have exceeded even Sputnik.

The fact that the new four-stage R-7 and Mars spacecraft were even launched is a testament to the can-do attitude of Korolev’s team against almost impossible odds. Nevertheless, a typical Russian sense of resignation ran underneath the optimism. In early September, during the scramble to make the launch date, a spacecraft engineer remarked. "‘Forget about that radio unit and all the Mars problems. The first time wc won’t fly any farther than Siberia!” He was right.

Spacecraft:

The spacecraft was essentially a cylindrical container, 2.035 meters long and with a diameter of 1.05 meters, pressurized to 1.2 bar with nitrogen for the avionics and instruments, with a dome on top housing the propulsion system, which was a fixed 1.96 kN К DU-414 res tar table liquid hypergolic rocket engine that burned nitric acid and dimethylhydrazine. The engine was capable of making one or more trajectory correction maneuvers with a total firing time of 40 seconds.

The pow er system consisted of two fixed 1.6 x 1.0 meter solar panels populated by a total of 2 square meters of solar cells, and had silver-zinc batteries for storage. Thermal control was achieved using internal circulation fans in association with shutters on the exterior to stabilize the internal temperature to 30 C.

The avionics included a telemetry tape recorder and a program timer (actually a clockw ork event sequencer) that had to be preset for a specific time of launch. The communication system consisted of three units. Л directional system used a high – gain 2.33 meter diameter fine copper net parabolic dish for 8 cm (3.7 GHz) and 32 an (922 MHz) band transmitters. This antenna was to open automatically when the spacecraft separated from the fourth stage of the launcher. Two cross-shaped semi-

Figure 7.1 Diagram of the 1M spacecraft: 1. Propulsion system nozzle; 2. Sun and star sensors; 3. Earth sensor (1VA only); 4. Parabolic high gain antenna; 5. Attitude control jets; 6. Thermal sensors; 7. Medium gain antenna; 8. Boom omni antenna.

Figure 7.2 The 1M Mars spacecraft.

directional medium-gain antennas were mounted on the back of the solar panels for the command receiver and for low bandwidth telemetry at 922.8 МН/. A low-gain omnidirectional antenna was affixed to the end of the 2.2 meter magnetometer boom Гог use near Earth in the 1.6 meier band. Commands were sent at 768.6 MHz at 1.6 bits/s. Before executing an uplinked command sequence, the spacecraft repeated it back and awaited acknowledgement from the ground.

Attitude sensing was achieved using fixed Sun and star sensors in combination with gyroscopes and accelerometers, and a system of nitrogen gas jets adopted from Luna 3 provided attitude control and З-axis stabilization. In cruise mode the solar panels were maintained within 10 degrees of perpendicular to the Sun. For telemetry sessions, the spacecraft used radio bearings to turn and lock onto Earth. For the 1VA Venus spacecraft, this mode was improved by using a separate Earth optical sensor.

Launch mass: 650 kg (dry mass —480 kg)

Payload:

1. Boom mounted triaxial fiuxgaLe magnetometer to search for a Martian magnetic field

2. Ion trap charged panicle detectors to investigate the interplanetary plasma medium

3. Micrometeoroid detector to investigate interplanetary spacecraft hazards

4. Cosmic ray detectors to measure radiation hazards in space

5. Infrared radiometer to measure the Martian surface temperature

6. Facsimile film camera system to image the surface (not down)

7. Infrared 3 to 4 micron C-II band spectrometer to search for organic compounds (not flown)

8. Ultraviolet spectrometer to detenu і ne atmospheric composition (not flown)

Most of the instruments were externally mounted. 1 he camera and spectrometer were inside the pressurized module with their optics observing through a port. The camera was the same facsimile film system as that flown on Luna 3 to photograph the Moon and used the 3.7 GHz channel for transmission. It would be triggered by a Mars sensor.

The interplanetary cruise instruments were derived from balloon and sounding- rocket experiments. Shmaia Dolginov supplied the magnetometer and Konstantin Gringauz the two ion traps. The cosmic ray detectors consisted of two Geiger counters and one sodium iodide scintillator inside the pressurized container, and one cesium iodide scintillator mounted externally, all of which were supplied by Sergey Vernov. Tatiana Nazarova provided the mierometeoroid sensor.

All three key planetary instruments outlined in Keldysh’s memo in March were ultimately deleted. The schedule was set in February and the launch window opened on September 20, leaving very little time to build the instruments. The spacecraft itself had a large number of problems in development and testing. On September 20 the radio was still at the factory and the electrical system was not working. The radio

had further problems after it arrived for integration with the spacecraft. By now the minimum energy launch date on September 27 had passed, and every day thereafter the mass that could be launched diminished. To save mass as the days passed, the camera system was deleted. It had suffered test and integration problems of its own. Finally, as the end of the launch window approached, the infrared spectrometer, which had failed to detect life during a field test in Kazakhstan, and the ultraviolet spectrometer were deleted. Pressure integrity tests of the avionics compartment were never done. After the launch of the first spacecraft failed and the mass constraint tightened, the entire science payload and midcourse engine were removed. As it was too late in the launch window to attempt the desired close flyby of Mars, the goal of the mission was reduced to simply gaining flight experience with the spacecraft.

Payload mass: 10 kg

Mission description:

Spacecraft 1M No. l arrived at the pad on October 8 and was launched on October 10, towards the end of the launch window. It did not achieve Earth orbit. Resonant vibrations in the launcher during the second stage burn caused a gyroscope in the avionics to malfunction. At 309 seconds into the Fight, after third stage ignition, the vehicle pitched over beyond permissible limits and the engine was shut down. The stack crashed in eastern Siberia.

Figure 7.3 Preparing for the first test of the new four-stage R-7 on October 10, 1960, carrying the 1M Mars flyby spacecraft.

1M No.2 did not achieve Earth orbit either. Its launcher failed after 290 seconds, when the third stage engine failed to ignite. An oxidi/er leak on the pad had frozen the kerosene in the feed pipes. The launch window closed before the planned third spacecraft could be launched. The failure of the third stage on both launches robbed the new fourth stage and the spacecraft of any chance to perform.

The Soviets made no announcement of either launch, since they had not reached orbit. But the IJS was cognizant, having tracked them from its surveillance station in Turkey and from a reconnaissance aircraft flying between Turkey and Iran. Tracking stations along the southern borders of the USSR readily picked up radio traffic prior to launches, and the telemetry from early Soviet launch vehicles was unencrypted. The deployment of tracking ships was a further indication that a launch attempt was imminent, and in any ease planetary launch windows were well known. Only a few lunar and planetary launches escaped detection by the Americans.

Nikita Khrushchev was in New York for a United Nations meeting during the launch period. He had a model of the 1M Mars probe with him as a bragging piece. After the first failure, instead of boasting w ith his model, he made his famous speech with accompanying shoe-banging on October 12. When the second launch failed, he was on his way back to the USSR with his model.

Results:

None.