A DEBILITATING ATTEMPT AT MARS IN 1996

The tortuous path from Phobos to Mars-96:

Turmoil reigned after the failure of the Phobos missions. The long-held tolerance in the Soviet space program for failure in the attempt of bold initiatives collapsed. One result of international exposure was to open the Soviet space program to scrutiny at high political levels, where it was punished by a severe budget cut in 1990, a year of general economic gloom in the USSR.

rnside IKI a debate ensued about whether to repeat the Phobos mission in 1992 with the backup spacecraft, or to devise a new mission to the Martian surface. There were competing priorities at IKI, at the Vernadsky Institute, and with the French who were still pursuing their balloon ideas with the Soviets albeit this time at Mars
instead of Venus. While the Phobos missions were being developed, a follow-on mission plan had been studied. Named ‘Columbus’, this called for dual or biters in 1992 and 1994 with entry vehicles to drop French balloons into the atmosphere and Soviet rovers onto the surface. By 1989 the government had not provided the money required to launch the project in 1992 so the proposal was delayed with two orbiters in 1994 carrying small landers and the French balloons, two orbiters in 1996 with the rovers, and a sample return mission in 1998. A meeting was held in Moscow’ in November 1989 to solicit international participation. The first funding for Mars-94 w7as in April 1990, and both Germany and France agreed to contribute investigations equivalent to over SI20 million. Ultimately twenty countries, including the US, were to provide science investigations.

The French balloon was a bold and exciting aspect of the 1989 plan. Its envelope was a 6 micron thick film in the shape of a cylinder 13.2 meters in diameter and 42 meters tall. It was to be inflated with 5,000 cubic meters of helium at an altitude of about 10 km during the parachute descent. After being released, it would float at an altitude of 2 to 4 km during the warm day and descend during the cold night to drag a 7 meter long instrumented tail along the surface in order to ensure that the balloon remained airborne. The tail, also known as the snake, carried 3.4 kg of instruments including a gamma-ray spectrometer, thermometer, and a subsurface radar that used the titanium segmented snake as its antenna. A 15 kg gondola suspended below the balloon and above the snake carried a camera, infrared spectrometer, magnetometer, re fleet ome ter and al time ter. and a meteorological package to measure temperature, pressure and humidity. It was expected that the balloon would last 10 to 15 diurnal cycles and travel several thousand kilometers. In another first, tests of the balloon were carried out in the American Mojave desert in 1990 by a joint team of Russian. French and American scientists and engineers.

The other exciting feature was the Mars rover. The USSR had sent two successful rovers to the Moon in the early 1970s. and now7 modified this technology for Mars. The Mars rover was smaller than its lunar predecessor, but at 200 kg was still large. It had a clever new chassis and wheel design, and with a top speed of 500 meters per hour it w7as expected to drive 500 km during the lifetime of 2 to 3 years facilitated by its R I G power supply. The rover was equipped with four cameras for panoramic coverage, a quadrupole mass spectrometer for atmospheric analysis, a laser aerosol spectrometer, a visible-infrared spectrometer for surface analysis, magnets to reveal the magnetic properties of the soil, a radio sounder to probe subsurface structure to a depth of 150 meters, a meteorology package, and a manipulator arm that would dig 10 cm into the surface to obtain samples for a pyrolytic gas chromatograph. The arm also carried a camera for close-up observation of the soil, an alpha, proton and x-ray spectrometer for elemental analysis of the soil, a Mossbauer spectrometer to analyse the iron mineralogy of the soil, and a gas analyzer to identify any trace gases.

Both the balloon and the rover would ultimately be deleted, however. In 1990 the USSR was in financial distress, and the money for developing the Mars-94 mission arrived slowly and in smaller amounts than required. By April 1991 it was clear that the money was insufficient to address all of the ambitions of the mission. It became necessary to postpone the balloons and rovers to 1996, and send a simpler mission in 1994. The Mars-94 mission would now be a single launch of an orbiter with small landers similar to that of Mars 3 (which was successfully delivered to the surface, although it had failed immediately afterwards) and new penetrators developed by the Vernadsky Institute.

On New Year’s Day 1992 the USSR was formally dissolved, Russia emerged as an independent state, and financial problems became acute. In the past money had never been an issue in developing a planetary mission but it now became the pacing item. It was not delivered when required or fell short. Parts were not delivered by contractors. Work on Mars-94 declined into a stop-go affair depending on whether there was money and parts. In desperation the project asked for financial assistance from its international partners. In order to protect their investments in the mission, Germany and France sent $10 million in late 1993. An appeal was made to the US. but after the loss of the Phobos missions the Americans were suspicious of Russian capabilities and were nervous about investing in a foreign project that was in such a visibly dismal state. Besides, in August 1993 NASA had its first ever inflight loss of a planetary spacecraft when Mars Observer fell silent while preparing for Mars orbit insertion, and the agency was struggling to salvage its own program.

Fearing that the troubled Mars-94 project was in severe danger of delivering an ill-prepared spacecraft in 1994. the new Russian Space Agency (RSA) postponed the mission until 1996. The second spacecraft with the balloon and rover was slipped to 1998. The risk in this move was that money from the new7 and financially strapped government would dry up altogether, but the RSA gave the Mars-96 mission its full support and the government declared the project to be a high priority. If it w ere not for the international obligations and the Western currency involved, the mission just might have been canceled. It continued in the face of technical and financial issues. When the camera scan platform ran into technical difficulties the Russians proposed deleting it in favor of fixed mountings in order to save money. The Genua ns. who were building the cameras, became outraged, and in the end saved the scan platform by sending their own engineers to fix the problems. The Russian government did not send all the money that it had promised. The RSA pulled funds from lower priority missions, and more money ultimately as much as SI80 million more was sent by Western partners to keep the project alive. Cancellation remained a possibility. The RSA went 80 million rubles into debt to complete the final integration and testing of the Mars-96 spacecraft in early 1996, by which time the Mars-98 mission with the balloon and rover had been canceled. Promised funding from the government just never arrived. The financial problems in the Russian space program were so bad that the ships in the tracking fleet were recalled to port and most of them sold off. One ship was made into a museum, and another was conscripted into the Ukrainian Black Sea naval fleet. The loss of these tracking vessels would eventually prove a serious problem to the project.

The situation at Baikonur in the summer of 1996 while preparing the mission for launch was atrocious. There were power shortages as utility bills went unpaid. Work was often done with heat from kerosene burners, light by candle, and labor without pay. With such a long protracted development under such adverse conditions, it took a heroic effort to get the Mars-96 spacecraft to the launch pad. Perhaps due to all the

Mars-96 (Ml No.520) Mars Orbiter/Landers USS R/NPO-Lavochkin Pro ion-K

November 16, 1996 at 20:48:53 UT (Baikonur) Launch failure, fourth stage misfired.

adversity in mounting this mission, ii failed during the launch process and ihere was little hope that the Russians would be able to attempt another planetary mission for many years to come.