First Rockets Set to Go in 1992 : Soviet Mars Mission Aims to Bring Samples Home

Soviet space scientists stunned their counterparts from around the world Wednesday when they announced that the Soviet Union plans to send an armada of unmanned spacecraft to Mars and bring back chunks of the Red Planet.

The ambitious plan, which is to be completed by the end of the next decade, would require launching at least 60,000 pounds of scientific instruments, support equipment and automated rovers that could roam the surface of Mars, according to U.S. space experts.

“That’s more mass in orbit than we have launched during the entire U.S. planetary program to date,” said Caltech planetary scientist Bruce Murray.

Although some aspects of the project could change before the first rockets are sent on their way toward Mars in 1992, the fact that top-level Soviet scientists described the program in such detail, at an international symposium in Pasadena, reveals that it has the blessing of the Soviet government, according to U.S. scientists familiar with how the Soviet system works.

Roald Kremnev, director of the Soviet Union’s Center for Unmanned Spacecraft and a top official in his country’s scientific establishment, said in an interview that he is “assured” that the project will move ahead.

“This is quite realistic,” Kremnev said through an interpreter.

Kremnev unveiled the program during the first International Conference on Solar System Exploration, which continues through today at the Pasadena Convention Center. The conference, which has attracted about 400 scientists and engineers from the United States, Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union, is sponsored jointly by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Soviet announcement was greeted with excitement by U.S. and European scientists, some of whom were still smarting with envy over a more modest Mars exploration program discussed Tuesday by Valeriy Barsukov, director of the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry in Moscow. That program, which does not include returning Martian samples to Earth, now looms as little more than a precursor to the grand plan unveiled Wednesday.

The Soviet program will include one and probably two rovers that will be able to roam the surface of Mars. The larger of the two, possibly powered by a nuclear plant, will be able to venture as far as 250 miles from its landing site, Kremnev said. The rovers will collect samples from a wide area of the planet and return them to a launch vehicle.

Meanwhile, other scientific devices will poke and drill into the planet, collecting information and transmitting it back to scientists in the Soviet Union.

Blasted Up to Spacecraft

At the end of the surface exploration, which could take several months, the samples will be blasted up to a spacecraft orbiting Mars, and then returned to Earth.

It will require at least six launches of the large Proton rocket--the backbone of the Soviet space program--to carry the heavy payloads to Mars, Kremnev said.

The launches will be conducted in three segments of two each, in 1992, 1994 and 1996. The Soviets conduct parallel launches to provide total backup so that if one rocket fails, the entire mission will not be lost, according to U.S. scientists.

So if all goes according to plan, well before the end of the century Soviet scientists should have collected the first samples from another planet as part of a project many now view as a precursor to even bolder plans, most likely a manned expedition to Mars.

A number of U.S. scientists, who said they learned of the extent of the Soviet Mars program for the first time Wednesday, said the program reveals profound differences between the Soviet approach to space exploration and the approach followed by the United States and Europe.

Launches Over 4 Years

“They know what a program is,” said John Casani, head of the JPL Galileo project that hopes to launch a spacecraft toward Jupiter in 1989. “We still think in terms of single missions, single launches.”

Instead, the Soviets are embarking on a program involving several launches over at least four years, integrated in such a way as to reach a major goal. The result should be the achievement of a critical milestone in planetary exploration with a sample return from Mars, according to several space experts.

“A lot of people around here are hanging their heads,” said one American scientist, clearly envious.

A sample-return mission is a dream held dear by many space scientists, because close examination of soil and rocks from Mars could answer a number of key questions, including whether primitive life forms may have started to materialize on Mars, but failed in the earliest stages.

Other scientists want to know what happened to the water that is thought to have once covered so much of the planet. When it disappeared, possibly as ice beneath the dusty surface, it most likely carried with it all chances of life developing on Earth’s neighbor.