Spacecraft Russia Aimed at Mars Lands in Pacific

Russia’s most ambitious space probe landed with an ignominious 6.7-ton splash in the South Pacific on Sunday, along with a chunk of the country’s battered scientific prestige, after a booster rocket under the Mars-bound craft misfired.

Pieces of the plutonium-laden probe crashed into the Pacific “in a broad ocean area west of Chile,” according to calculations by the U.S. Space Command’s Space Control Center in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo. Earlier predictions had suggested that the craft would crash in central Australia, raising fears of nuclear contamination--a danger that had been termed remote.

The failure of the Mars 96 mission was a heartbreaking blow to Russia’s financially strained space program, which had spent at least $64 million and eight years preparing for it.

Spurred by new evidence that there may have been life on Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, 19 European nations and the United States had crammed more than a ton of scientific instruments aboard the craft to photograph Mars, study its atmosphere and sift its reddish soil.

A four-stage Proton rocket sent the probe up early Sunday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan--a blastoff that lighted up the surrounding steppe and cheered the 120 invited foreign scientists who had worked with Russia to ready the mission.

By dawn, without any formal announcement, word filtered out to the guests that something had gone wrong.

“At first we didn’t believe it. The launch was beautiful. Everything worked. This is something you work on for years. Then suddenly, within seconds, you realize it’s gone,” said Jurgen Rahe, program director for planetary exploration at NASA.

Russian space officials said later that the first three boosters fired properly but the fourth did not, depriving the spacecraft of enough thrust to launch it on its planned 10-month, 48-million-mile journey.

Sunday’s landing in the Pacific Ocean--about 1,800 miles off the coast of Chile--was greeted with relief. For much of the afternoon, U.S. space-tracking technology was focused on an orbit that had the craft headed for Australia, posing a minor risk that the crash could release a small, lethal plutonium cloud.

President Clinton contacted Australian Prime Minister John Howard upon learning of the threat and offered U.S. help in locating and recovering any nuclear material, officials said.

The sudden international drama centering on the skies above Australia came a day before Clinton was to leave for his first visit to that nation. The president was vacationing in Hawaii on Sunday when news of the errant space mission spread. Clinton’s schedule calls for stops this week in Sydney, Canberra and Port Douglas.

While most of the spacecraft had been expected to burn up before hitting the ground, attention Sunday focused on four plutonium-powered batteries located in two large sections of the probe. In a “worst-case scenario,” the batteries might have released a small cloud of plutonium, said Robert Bell, a senior director for defense policy at the National Security Council.

The four canisters that carried plutonium, each about the size of a 35-millimeter film container, “were designed to survive great heat. . . . and to survive great stress on impact,” Bell said.

Scientists said the mission’s failure might force Russia to abandon its Mars exploration program. They also said it could tarnish the most promising legacy of the Soviet space era--the commercial sale of Russian rockets to Western companies to launch their satellites.

“All their eggs were in this one basket,” said James Oberg, an American engineer who studies the Russian space effort.

“This probe was supposed to show they were still world-class players. . . . We have watched them teetering on the brink of disaster for years, reducing their funding and their personnel. Now we’re starting to see the pieces breaking.”

He and other Western specialists predicted that the Russians will probably shelve the Mars program for at least a decade because of a lack of funding.

But a spokesman for the Russian space agency, Vladimir A. Ananyev, challenged that assumption.

“What might happen if the Americans had been disappointed by their failures in space?” he asked. “We should behave the same way and not stop our research.”

As space agency officials huddled to discuss the cause and consequences of the failure, Russian news media called the day a disaster.

“This is a black day for Russia’s space program,” said a newscaster on the Independent Television channel. “Eight years were spent in vain.”

Russia’s last Mars mission failed when Phobos-1 and Phobos-2, launched a few days apart in July 1988, vanished without a trace. Mars 96, the second in the planned series of three missions, was delayed two years by financial problems.

The space program gets about one-fifth of the government funding it received in Soviet times. The money Russia reported spending on Mars 96 is a pittance compared with NASA’s $100-million-per-year budget for Mars exploration.

Hundreds of scientists have quit Russia’s Institute for Space Research, and most of those who remain have to moonlight at unskilled jobs to feed their families. The crisis has sharpened in recent months as scientists have joined teachers, miners, military officers and workers in street rallies demanding payment of delayed government wages.

Mars 96 “was a labor of love for the people at the space institute,” said John E. Pike, a space expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. “They have been working on it in their spare time, while driving taxis.”

Another American familiar with the project said: “The rocket was scrambled together in the last minute. Six weeks ago, the Russians couldn’t tell the Americans if they had a rocket.”

In the West, he said, “you know from two years out which piece of hardware is going to be mated with what. Here you had different organizations going right up to the wire saying, ‘I need this and I need that.’ ” As a result, he said, “there wasn’t as much testing as you’d want to see.”

Russian space officials said little about what went wrong with the fourth booster, which was manufactured by Russia’s recently privatized space giant, RKK Energiya. The booster was supposed to ignite twice, giving the probe two boosts, half an hour apart. The second ignition never happened.

Jeffrey Manber, managing director of Energiya’s American branch, said suspicion in Moscow focused on a possible malfunction of the probe’s control system and not on the Proton rocket itself, which has what independent specialists call a 96% reliability record.

Manber said the control system, part of the probe manufactured by another Russian company called Lavochkin, “may have failed to send the proper signal” to the rocket booster for the second ignition.

As a result of a two-year marketing effort, Russia has at least five paying customers in the West lined up to launch their satellites on Proton rockets at Baikonur between now and 2002.

Those clients and their insurers are certain to be worried by the Mars 96 fiasco, Manber said. But he added that concern should ease once the Russians identify the cause of the trouble--as they did promptly after the similar failure of a Proton booster rocket in February.

Times staff writers Jonathan Peterson in Honolulu and Ralph Vartabedian in Los Angeles contributed to this report.