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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?
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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).
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Read the WHOLE article, stupid.
Their high end MIGS were made of wood.
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.
Who gives a rats how shitty it looked. What was important was that it achieved its goals. In terms of data acquisition probably not thanks to the weather, but in terms of proving that you could land something on mars to perform a task on a low budget the answer is a resounding yes. And that's valuable data in itself. You may recall that the soviets put a very successful rover on the moon as well...
Great documentory on the Russian initiatives for remote operated vehicles - very clever stuff !
You've got to remember that here we are 40 years later and the Russians have yet to land a man on the Moon.
You make it sound as though it has been a Russian initiative for 50 years to land a cosmonaut on the Moon, but it only was so from 1961-1974. After 74, there was no such initiative for a manned lunar landing, so here we are 40 years later and for the last 38 of them the Russian's haven't been trying. You'd be just as correct to say that for the last 40 years the US had been unable to land a man on the Moon. So let's not overplay Russian space failures and US successes... (after all, the US has killed far more astronauts with its program than the Russians). Instead let's celebrate the successful cooperation the US and Russians have had in space.
It DIDN'T achieve its goals, possibly because the lander that was supposed to deliver it was constructed the same roughshod way.
I didn't mention rounded edges. Those probably DO "matter to science" - or at least the survival of the instruments to perform it - in some specific situations, but I didn't mention the lack of them.
Balsa?
They played music on Mars today. With no one there to hear it, was there any sound?
That joke sucked.
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.
The skis still have moving parts. They need to be lifted up and put down. For a robot like this, no moving parts means no movement at all.
Now there are transport systems with no moving parts but they use linear accelerators.
Yeah, those rough edges surely impeded the Soviet progam...
1957: First satellite, Sputnik 1
1957: First animal to enter Earth orbit, the dog Laika on Sputnik 2
1959: First firing of a rocket in Earth orbit, first man-made object to escape Earth's orbit, Luna 1
1959: First data communications, or telemetry, to and from outer space, Luna 1.
1959: First man-made object to pass near the Moon, first artificial satellite in Solar orbit, Luna 1
1959: First probe to impact the Moon, Luna 2
1959: First images of the moon's far side, Luna 3
1960: First animals to safely return from Earth orbit, the dogs Belka and Strelka on Sputnik 5.
1960: First probe launched to Mars, Marsnik 1 (failed to reach target)
1961: First probe launched to Venus, Venera 1
1961: First person in space (International definition) and in Earth orbit, Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1, Vostok programme
1961: First person to spend over a day in space Gherman Titov, Vostok 2 (also first person to sleep in space).
1962: First dual crewed spaceflight, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4
1963: First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, Vostok 6
1964: First multi-person crew (3), Voskhod 1
1965: First EVA, by Aleksei Leonov, Voskhod 2
1965: First probe to hit another planet (Venus), Venera 3
1966: First probe to make a soft landing on and transmit from the surface of the moon, Luna 9
1966: First probe in lunar orbit, Luna 10
1967: First automated, crewless rendezvous and docking, Cosmos 186/Cosmos 188. (Until 2006, this had remained the only major space achievement that the US had not duplicated.)
1969: First docking between two crewed crafts in Earth orbit and exchange of crews, Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5
And how many other projects failed for poor workmanship or planning? I never said it impeded the overall Soviet space program; that is your own inflation of what I said. I simply noted that it was poor craftsmanship. What you've failed to grasp is that the Soviets managed their space program the same way they managed their military assets in World War II: they relied on quantity to carry the day; three T-34s for every one higher quality Panther or Tiger. For every successful mission you list above, there were quiet failures. Unlike NASA, the Soviets were prepared to take losses in stride.
Their high end MIGS were made of wood.
Aside from WW2 planes and earlier, which of the high end MIGs were made of wood?
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.
I always thought the Soviet Lunokhod moon rovers were pretty impressive achievements. I believe that Lunokhod 2 still holds the record for the longest distance traveled by any non terrestrial rover. Both were launched in the early 1970's. Of course such technological achievements were over shadowed by the US astronaut missions.
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.
Since it didn't actually rove...
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It still does, but just barely now. Lunokhod 2 managed 37km in its 4-5 month life span, Opportunity has gone 35km in 8.5 years. However, second place belongs to the Apollo 17 rover, at 36 km, which was done in 2 days.
Actually, that's more or less something of a myth. If you look at the delay taken after a failed manned mission, for instance, the Soviets would take significantly longer time to look over their mistakes than the US would.
There were certainly quiet failures, but those have come out into the open by now. After the fall of the iron curtain and the declassification of Soviet space information, there was no discovery of any body of fatal accidents so massive that they indicate that the Soviet Union took, as you put it "losses in stride" to any greater extent than the United States did.
toresbe
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.
It contained a rover.
The article title says "First rover to land on Mars", not "First rover to rove on Mars". So, I guess it's accurate.
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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.
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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!
But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, viniculture, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Russians ever done for us?
All true but let's take a closer look at comparable Soviet and American missions -- Luna 9 and Surveyor 1, the first soft landers on the moon by the respective programs. Luna 9 -- landed Feb 3, 1966, transmitted three series of TV pictures over an 8 hour period. The last contact with the spacecraft was made on Feb 6, three days after landing. Surveyor 1 -- landed June 2, 1966, transmitted over 11,000 photos from the lunar surface, including wide-angle and narrow-angle panoramas, focus ranging surveys, photometric surveys, special area surveys, and celestial photography. Surveyor 1 continued from to return engineering data for over 7 months (until Jan 7, 1967) with interruptions during the two week lunar nights (the spacecraft was solar powered), but it survived the nights and began operations again when the sun powered it up. 3 days of lunar operations by Luna 9 vs 7 months by Surveyor 1 -- Luna 9 was an achievement, no question, but Surveyor 1 was a considerably more capable device. And Surveyor 1 was followed by Surveyors 3, 5, 6, and 7 with similar performances. A similar comparison can be made between the Soviet Mars 3 lander and the American Viking 1 lander on Mars. (statistics above taken from the Wikipedia pages).
Yes, but aside from all that, what did the Soviets ever do for us?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
Sorry, you don't know that, no one knows that.
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were made of wood
If it weighs the same as a duck...
rounded edges are the invention of apple, we just established that. sheesh.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
No doubt with apologies to all the furniture craftsmen who've been making furniture with radiused corners for... centuries?
Of course they tried to learn from the failures. The difference is that they didn't obsess and over-engineer in the first place like NASA; they simply couldn't afford it, didn't have the resources, as this little rover demonstrates rather clearly. They satisfied some minimum standard, and then if/when that failed them they learned from it how the minimum standard needed to be revised for the next time... because for them there always was a next time. That is very different from how NASA has operated. I'm an unwilling perfectionist myself, so my natural tendency is to approach things like NASA, get it perfect the first time. Seeing this rover was an "offense" to the way I'm compelled to do things, but I understand why it was done that way. Not everyone is or can afford to be a perfectionist. Some people don't have a choice afford it or not, but that's another story.