The Soviet lunar and planetary exploration legacy

A HISTORICAL SYNOPSIS

The history of exploring the Solar System by spacecraft is short, spanning less than 42 years at the end of the 20th Century. Prior to January 1,2001, there had been 182 launches. Of these, 89 were successful or partly successful, and three were in transit to their ultimate destinations. The exploration of the planets was dominated in the 20th Century by competition between the USSR and USA. Only five of the total of 182 missions were developed by other parties. It was not until 1985 that Europe and Japan launched their own deep space missions.

In the early years of the space race the USSR was usually first to achieve major feats at the Moon, Venus, and Mars. After the ncck-to-neck race to the Moon in the 1960s, and its culmination with Apollo, the US, which had also had greater success with planetary missions, assumed the leading position in robotic exploration in the 1970s with unopposed successes at Mars, Mercury, and the outer Solar System. The USSR had no answer to the Mariner 9 Mars orbiter, the two Viking orbiters and landers at Mars, the Mariner 10 flybys of Mercury, or the Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 missions to the outer planets – a realm where the Soviets were not technologically prepared to go. The US had conceded only Venus, where the Venera missions reigned supreme. At the beginning of the 1980s the Soviet program could be said to have won the competition at Venus, but lost it everywhere else. This trend changed with the Vega missions in the middle of that decade. The USSR vigorously participated in the International Halley Mission with the European Space Agency and Japan, and contributed two spacecraft as platforms for instruments from any country that wished to provide them. The Europeans and the USSR led this highly successful and precedent-setting enterprise for the Old Continent. The Americans of the New World were a minor player and did not even send a spacecraft to Halley for this first world-wide planetary exploration endeavor.

By the mid-1980s, the Soviets had seized the lead in planetary exploration from the Americans. The USSR gained a great deal of pride and prestige around the world from the Vega missions to Comet Halley, and decided as a matter of policy to open

W. T. Huntress and M. Y. Marov, Soviet Robots in the Solar System: Mission Technologies and Discoveries, Springer Praxis Books 1, DOl 10.1007/978-1-4419-7898-1 21,

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 up future missions to international participation. They would be essentially Russian vehicles and Russian-led missions, but with instruments and scientific participation from around the world. The Americans were at a significant disadvantage in this situation, since they did not have the massive spacecraft to offer valuable instrument real estate to others and to compete with the Russians in this way. In addition, the US planetary program wras suffering from a major decline in the 1980s starting with the administration of Ronald Reagan, who preferred a more direct competition with the Soviet Union.

The Vega campaign had been conceived as an almost entirely Soviet mission with some participation by the French, but was modified with international instruments, many from the Eastern Bloc, being added for the Halley intercept. The next Soviet planetary mission, Phobos. was internationalized earlier in its development, look this to a greater extreme, and had more instruments of Western origin. Mars-96 was the culmination of the international style of Soviet planetary missions, with instruments openly and broadly solicited from around the world and with a larger investment by Western countries including the US. It is supremely ironic that the Americans, who prided themselves on the openness of their space exploration program, remained far more xenophobic in their planetary exploration program than the Soviets, and were obliged to concede the lead in international planetary exploration missions to the Vega, Phobos and Mars-96 missions.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, attempts to form partnerships between the US and Russian planetary programs failed as the resources for further Russian planetary missions dried up in major national economic problems. The abysmal loss of Mars-96 created an international disaster, demoralized the national program, and embarrassed the post-Soviet Russian national government and its new space agency. Already beset with financial problems, Russia cut its investment in space science missions. At the end of the 20lh Century, the Russian national program of robotic planetary exploration appeared to have been postponed indefinitely.

Unfortunate fate has been a bedfellow to Russian history for a millennium, and so it was for the Russian planetary exploration program just as it reached its peak in the late 1980s while that of the US was declining. A decade later there w? as no Russian planetary exploration program, the IJS program was revitalized, and the French, a bell-weather for international involvement in space science and a participant on Soviet missions since the early 1970s. were now making trips to Washington instead of to Moscow. But the hopes and dreams remained alive in Russia. After watching from the sidelines since 1996. and contributing primarily by offering launch services for cash, the Russians are just now emerging after a 15 year absence with the launch of a Phobos sample return mission scheduled for 2011 and with plans for a lunar orbiteriander missions for later in the decade.