Soviets Launch Rocket to Mars, Take Major Role in Space Exploration

With the flags of 13 nations flapping in a summer breeze, an unmanned Soviet rocket blasted off for Mars on Thursday night in a dramatic demonstration of international participation in the Soviet space program.

Scientists from around the world gathered in Moscow and at the Baikonur launch site in Soviet Central Asia as the Proton rocket roared into the night sky. But they waited until the rocket’s fourth stage fired more than an hour later to begin celebrating. That thrust sent the spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit and on a 110-million-mile voyage to Mars.

The launch marks the emergence of the Soviet Union as a major force in the planetary sciences, a field once dominated by the United States. It was the opening round in a series of missions to Mars that Soviet scientists hope will lead to a manned expedition to the red planet by the year 2010.

The spacecraft is to reach Mars around Jan. 25, and early next April it is to send two landers to the Martian moon of Phobos--the first man-made devices to reach another celestial body in more than a decade.

“I will wait until then to drink my champagne,” said Dietrich Hovestadt of the Max Planck Institute in West Germany, one of the many scientists participating in the project. Moments after the launch, carried live on Soviet television, cameras panned along the flags of the participating countries.

The U.S. flag was in the center because a handful of U.S. scientists have been working with the Soviets on their Mars program for several years. But the only piece of U.S. hardware on the spacecraft is a plaque pointing out that Phobos was discovered by an American astronomer.

The rocket launched Thursday night will be followed by the launch of a sister spacecraft Tuesday, in keeping with the Soviet policy of doing everything in duplicate. If all goes well with the first spacecraft, the second can be diverted to other chores on Mars.

Within minutes after the launch, congratulations poured in to Roald Sagdeev, director of the Space Research Institute here. “You’re on your way and right on schedule,” Lew Allen, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, said in a telephone call to Sagdeev, whose institute is the Soviet counterpart to JPL.

“It takes a special nervous system to do this kind of thing,” Sagdeev said later as he clasped his hands over his head in victory.

Phobos, a tortured little moon scarcely 15 miles in diameter, has been so bombarded with meteorites that it looks more like a battered potato than a moon. Phobos has long fascinated scientists because it appears on the brink of being torn apart by gravitational tidal forces from Mars. Some believe it could be an asteroid that happened to be passing by Mars at just the right moment eons ago and was captured in orbit.

By studying the moon, Soviet scientists hope to learn much about celestial mechanics, the laws of the universe that govern the relationship between orbiting bodies.

But Phobos should also reveal much about itself when the probes arrive on scene in about 200 days. It will be zapped with lasers to release gases that can be studied from orbit, and it will be penetrated with darts, probed and analyzed in the first planetary mission anyone has carried out in more than a decade. Not since 1976, when the U.S. Viking landers reached Mars, has any man-made device reached the surface of another celestial body.

The Phobos expedition is one of the most ambitious planetary missions ever attempted by the Soviets--several previous efforts failed many years ago--and it is as fraught with chances for disaster as it is with opportunities for success.

Both spacecraft are to go into orbit around Mars, and the plan is for them to fly perilously close to the tiny moon, sweeping about 150 feet above its rocky surface. The second craft, however, will stay out of harm’s way until the first has a chance to complete its mission, which includes sending two landers to the surface of Phobos.

But Phobos is so small that its gravitational pull is almost immeasurable, so the trick will be to get the landers to stay put once they reach the surface. The first will be released as the orbiter eases past Phobos at a relative velocity of 5 to 10 miles per hour.

The Phobos lander will fire small thrusters to send it toward the surface, and when it gets close enough, it will fire a harpoon into the moon and pull itself down. The lander is to remain in one spot indefinitely.

Ingenious Device

The second lander, however, is an ingenious little device called a “hopper,” according to a description of the mission released by Soviet scientists. The hopper, which looks a little like a mechanized ladybug, will unfold its spindly legs and literally hop around the moon in giant strides of about 60 feet.

Each time it lands, the hopper will use X-rays to study the chemical composition of the soil and a device called a “penetrometer” to study the moon’s physical properties and underlying geological structure. The hopper also will carry a magnetometer to measure magnetic fields and a gravimeter to measure the moon’s mass.

After it finishes in one spot, the strange device will hop on to the next.

Sagdeev said he hopes the hopper will complete at least 10 jumps before it finally tumbles over a crater or lodges against a rock, ending its peculiar odyssey.

Meanwhile, the other lander will be carrying out a wide range of scientific assignments, including listening to seismic noises as the tiny moon struggles against gravitational forces that could rip it apart during the next few million years.

In an article in the May issue of Physics Today, Sagdeev said that listening to Phobos’ tortured groans should tell much about the birth and death of satellites.

“Phobos is gradually approaching Mars due to tidal frictional forces on that planet,” Sagdeev said, describing a process that should ultimately cause the moon to disintegrate as it is torn between the gravity of Mars and the directional force of its orbit. “If we pin down the magnitude of this effect more precisely, we will be able to follow the history of satellite orbits, which is important to the problem of satellite origin.”

The results of that study should help scientists determine if Phobos, as well as Mars’ other moon, the even tinier Deimos, are indeed captured asteroids--those small, subplanetary chunks of material that revolve about the sun.

What will set the Phobos mission apart from other Soviet space exploits is the fact that people around the world should have a chance to watch.

Television cameras on the orbiters and on the fixed landers are expected to send back extremely sharp photos of both Mars and Phobos. Any object on Phobos larger than a couple of inches should be easily identified in the images, according to the Soviet prospectus on the mission.

Those images, like most of the scientific data, are to be made available to scientists all over the globe because the Phobos mission is truly international in scope.

2 Southland Scientists

Specialists from Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, East and West Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Sweden and the United States developed the scientific programs for the mission. U.S. scientists who are serving as investigators include Bruce Murray of Caltech and Fred Scarf of TRW and UCLA.

The Phobos expedition is by no means the first effort by the Soviets to reach Mars. According to the U.S. Naval Observatory, there have been 23 attempts to send unmanned spacecraft to Mars--15 by the Soviets and eight by the United States. Only seven were fully successful, most notably the U.S. Viking missions.