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Meet the Very First Rover To Land On Mars
toygeek writes "Before Curiosity, before Opportunity, before Spirit, and before Sojourner, the very first robot to land on Mars was this little guy, way back in December of 1971. Called PrOP-M, the rover was part of the Soviet Union's Mars-3 mission, which had the potential to deploy the first ever mobile scientific instruments onto the Martian surface. Article also contains Russian video on early rovers."
Interesting; seems to have died in a dust storm. Did PrOP-M's sacrifice save the later landers from the same fate?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
This is a lander, but not a rover.
Like the Mars Climate Orbiter was among the first weather stations to reach the surface of Mars.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Mars 3 was a probe, not a rover.
Soviets definitely got their probe on before the west, and probed repeatedly, both Mars and Venus.
The probes on Venus had really short lives, due to the inhospitable conditions.. lot of cash for a little bit of observations. (I think the longest living one made two hours? forget now).
Sent from my PDP-11
Boy, the Soviet space program really operated on a shoestring and with limited underpaid talent, didn't it? My grandfather could have made that thing in his little machine shop at the back of their quarter-acre property. Actually, he would have produced something that looked and functioned far better than this clunky little thing (the U.S. military got a lot of WWII machined parts from him). Good grief, the cuts in the plates look jagged or uneven and I could swear some welds are visible. It looks like a hobbyist project. So I guess the Soviet space program was just a hobby for the Politburo....
Was just curious, can any engineer explain to me their choice of skis against wheels for this little guy?
Fear not, for the battle continues, but know, o ye Citizens, how far we have fallen. Back in my day, when I was but a podling barely capable of any form of speech, let alone speaking on behalf of my fellow podmates, "twenty seconds to comply" wasn't just a good idea, it was the law.
When a retired news reporter suggested that maybe the Blue World had temporarily overestimated its engineering capabilities and had compounded this miscalculation by dropping the primitive contraption into a middle of an electrically-active dust storm, the Speaker's podseniors had the retired reporter's gelsacs affixed to his belt, which was the fashion at the time.
The early Russian space program treated Mars as more of a target than a destination. They were a volume business and yes they aimed a probe at Mars but there was a low probability of it surviving. I'm old enough to remember the probe impacting. I thought it was a testament to how hard it was to land a probe on Mars. The truth is they were more obsessed with the attempt than the success. You've got to remember that here we are 40 years later and the Russians have yet to land a man on the Moon. They've had lots of success with orbiting the Earth because it's easier and cheaper and they played the odds. The US was more cautious in the early days allowing the Russians to get the upper hand but we have largely ruled ever since. Obviously Mir was more successful than Skylab but once again it was because they took more risks and a low tech approach.
they want to know if anyone knowns where one if it's missing "vacuum" cleaners went.
Russian scientist on rover team: "it works in (using) a vacuum".
Great documentory on the Russian initiatives for remote operated vehicles - very clever stuff !
They played music on Mars today. With no one there to hear it, was there any sound?
With a code name like Prop M, it is no wonder people thought the moon landings happened in a Hollywood stage somewhere. I mean, Prop is what they call the set items used to give realistic effects to the stage and for helping tell stories, and of course M just seems like a catalog number.
Seriously, if i heard of a mars lander being called a prop, I might suspect some of the extremely extraordinary accomplishments too.
When I say that Mars rovers are things that could have been done with Cold War technologies, I pass for a boring unenthusiastic guy. But the thing is, we have been there, we have done that. When will we send an autonomous robot on Mars? Or one that can build stuff there? Or one that can dig deep enough to get to the water that we know is there, thanks to a high-tech spectrometer that scanned underground resources from orbit. Now that's a new piece of impressive tech that no one talks about.
How about trying to analyze and test filtering and electrolyse ice water that we know exist because we have pictures of it ? But forget about it. Yay remote controlled cars!
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The PROP-M carrier vehicle made it down- but failed after 20
seconds. If the rover even deployed, we never knew it, and
we definitely never actually got data back.
I was actually hoping to find out that there had been a "manned" mission to mars using a dog, complete with cute puppy pictures. God help me... social media has infected my brain.
1. It's not a rover if it never moved, and
2. It was never deployed, so technically it was never on the surface of mars itself.
The Mars-3 probe did at least enough to count.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
Wow, I just want to say, this is the first OP in a while that is actually news to me! Great post! Especially, I prior had no idea that NSSDC exists! Cool beans!
My dick was too big to ram it up inside your mother's anus.