Meet the Very First Rover To Land On Mars 59
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."
Dust storm? (Score:2)
Re:Dust storm? (Score:5, Informative)
The landers were not designed to "park" in orbit and had to land on a fixed schedule. Even if the dust storm was detected, nothing could be done. (US Mariner 9 orbiter arrived around the same time and had to wait months for that storm to clear before the surface was visible.)
Speculation is that once landed, dust storms tugged at the still-attached parachutes and yanked the Soviet landers over. This would explain the very short communication spans after landing.
Another speculation at the time was that they sank into quick-sand or quick-dust of some sort. Viking took that theory in hand and was designed to send back an image as soon as possible so that we could at least have one look. Viking's first image was of one of its footpads so if it was sinking, scientists could see the soil level above it in the (potentially final) image.
Vikings also had the ability to park in orbit so that the orbiters could check things out first. Whether this was done to avoid the fate of the Soviet landers or not, I can't say.
It paid off in that the original Viking 1 landing spot was discovered to be too risky using the orbiters' improved cameras. The planned Bicentennial (7/4/1976) landing was postponed because of it as a smoother spot was sought.
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Read the WHOLE article, stupid.
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Since it didn't actually rove...
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It contained a rover [wikipedia.org].
The article title says "First rover to land on Mars", not "First rover to rove on Mars". So, I guess it's accurate.
But it was a failure (Score:3)
A non-roving rover? (Score:2)
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.
Probe (Score:2, Informative)
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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Aren't they all (sattelites too) probes? I thought the difference was lander vs rover (vs orbiter).
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Oh and now I RTFA and it turns out Mars-3 was actually all 3: an orbiter for communication, a stationary lander, and a tiny little rover that was tethered to the lander.
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Yeah, I think rover should be independent - this is more of a movable sensor for the probe really, as opposed to some sort of autonomous rover... It doesn't need to carry it's own power source, or communications, etc.
lunokhod [wikipedia.org] series was a real rover though, first, no less. I guess the progenitor of all of them.
There's a documentary called 'tank on the moon' about the development of them. It shows footage of them trying various mechanisms - some including this 'walker' style - but ultimately they went for wh
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Yeah, I think rover should be independent - this is more of a movable sensor for the probe really, as opposed to some sort of autonomous rover... It doesn't need to carry it's own power source, or communications, etc.
And I don't see how using an external power source nullifies the principle aspect of a rover: That it roves.
The Sojourner rover never went more than 12m away from the lander. If the only way to accomplish the exact same mission was by having the lander provide power through a tether, then it wouldn't have counted? What if it received the power wirelessly?
Of course Sojourner wasn't autonomous anyway because it required the lander for communicating with earth. Which if autonomous communications are a requi
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Mars 3 was the complete mission, PrOP-M was the rover to be deployed by the lander (ala Pathfinder)
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Their high end MIGS were made of wood.
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Balsa?
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Their high end MIGS were made of wood.
Aside from WW2 planes and earlier, which of the high end MIGs were made of wood?
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were made of wood
If it weighs the same as a duck...
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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.
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No doubt with apologies to all the furniture craftsmen who've been making furniture with radiused corners [furniturelab.com] for... centuries?
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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...
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It DIDN'T achieve its goals, possibly because the lander that was supposed to deliver it was constructed the same roughshod way.
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Sorry, you don't know that, no one knows that.
Re:What incredible workmanship (Score:5, Informative)
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
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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, ther
Re:What incredible workmanship (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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'
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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, photo
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Yes, but aside from all that, what did the Soviets ever do for us?
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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.
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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.
Very Late-Breaking News: Forgotten Victory (Score:1)
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 new
Close but no cigar (Score:1)
Re:Close but no cigar (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That joke sucked.
Google "Tank on the Moon" (Score:2)
They sent a boom box to Mars! (Score:2)
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No they didn't. They beamed an audio file down to the rover, which then sent it back, in the same way they sent NASA Administrator Bolden's message. There are no speakers, and sadly no microphone on Curiosity. This was purely a PR stunt and dick-waving move for Bolden.
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You don't need speakers, you could play the sound on the motors powering the rover's wheels :-)
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Is that what that noise was? It sounded like a leper who hadn't had a drink in a while as they were staked to the ground in Death Valley.
My cat sounds better than whatever that "music" was.
Prop m (Score:1)
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.
40 years? And I should be enthusiastic? (Score:2)
How about tryi
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Why would anyone want to electrolyse water on Mars? Do you expect it to electrolyse in any other fashion than here on Earth, except costing 8 orders of magnitude more? Water is per se useless for a robotic mission, if we know it's there from orbiter imagery you don't need to send a rover to confirm, duh. The only useful thing would be to sample it and see if there are any microorganisms there. No electrolysis involved. Test filtering?! You can test filtering it here on Earth just fine.
As for cold war techno
Well, "impact". It never actually did anything (Score:1)
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.
You know you use Facebook too much when... (Score:1)
Great OP! (Score:2)
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!