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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();
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
Read the WHOLE article, stupid.
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.
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
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.
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
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).