Mars 3
When China's Zhurong made a successful soft landing on Mars last month (hooray!!), I remember reading an article that described China as the third country to achieve this feat. Despite much of my research focusing on Mars, I must confess that I did not realize before that moment that the Soviets had successfully landed on the planet! (All the space history buffs in the audience, you may commence your boos and gasps now.)
It turns out that not only did Mars 3 make a soft landing on Mars, but it beat Viking 1 by 4.5 years, landing on December 2, 1971. It also had an identical twin, Mars 2, that launched 9 days earlier and became the first missions to reach the surface of Mars, via a crash landing on November 27, 1971. Naturally, I was very interested to learn what data Mars 3 had returned! Unfortunately, it only transmitted from the surface for 20 seconds, and it is generally assumed to have failed at the end of that transmission, which was 110 seconds after landing. During its tragically brief life, the lander was only able to (partially) return a single image:
To make matters worse, as Russian space enthusiast Vitaliy Egorov explains, that vertical contrast is unlikely to be the horizon, as the original orientation of the image is rotated 90 degrees. Then again, maybe the lander was lying on its side? Emily Lakdawalla cites some Internet debate about this possibility, but unfortunately, both of those links are now dead.
Nearly 20 years after Mars 2 and Mars 3,
Dr. Alexander Kermurjian revealed to the world (via an exclusive
to The Planetary Report) that each mission had a rover! There was even some
speculation at that time that the Mars 3 rover may have deployed to the
surface!! However, given the evidence that the landed mission ended after 110
seconds, that seems extremely unlikely to me (although I am a complete novice
on this subject, I freely admit).
Whatever
the fate of the Mars 3 rover, it would not be until nearly 30 years
later that anyone else landed a rover on Mars, namely, NASA's Mars
Pathfinder in 1997. (Incidentally, that mission landed when I was in junior
high and galvanized my interest in space exploration.) Given the technological
constraints of the day, I find the Mars 3 rover fascinating! It effectively
had insect-like antennae (that foremost crossbar is split at its center, if you
look closely) that it used to detect obstacles in front of it. By necessity,
given the several round-trip light time of 8-40 minutes between Earth and Mars,
the rover drove by an autonomous obstacle avoidance system, and it was linked to
the lander by a 15-m umbilical. Without taking anything away from all of
this amazing ingenuity and accomplishment, I'd also like to add, subjectively,
that I think this rover is extraordinarily cute (albeit in a brutalist sort of
way)! Look at this amazing gif of how it moved!
After excitedly describing all of this to my wife, and showing her the animation,
she responded admiringly (paraphrase): "So, basically it was a robotic frog on
a leash."
As an intriguing epilogue, that Russian Mars enthusiast I mentioned before, Vitaliy Egorov, may even have discovered Mars 3 on the surface of Mars in 2013. Although the case is necessarily circumstantial, he and his crowd-sourced collaborators methodically searched a HiRISE images from the center of the Mars 3 landing ellipse and identified several features of interest that are plausibly consistent with parts of the Mars 3 lander, including the main body, its parachute, heat shield (or "brake cone" in Soviet terminology), and back shell. One of the more compelling lines of evidence is the separation between the putative backshell and rocket motor. In the HiRISE image, the best estimate is 4.8 m, and in Soviet engineering drawings, they are connected by a cable 4.52 meters long, a discrepancy of only ~1 pixel.
As an intriguing epilogue, that Russian Mars enthusiast I mentioned before, Vitaliy Egorov, may even have discovered Mars 3 on the surface of Mars in 2013. Although the case is necessarily circumstantial, he and his crowd-sourced collaborators methodically searched a HiRISE images from the center of the Mars 3 landing ellipse and identified several features of interest that are plausibly consistent with parts of the Mars 3 lander, including the main body, its parachute, heat shield (or "brake cone" in Soviet terminology), and back shell. One of the more compelling lines of evidence is the separation between the putative backshell and rocket motor. In the HiRISE image, the best estimate is 4.8 m, and in Soviet engineering drawings, they are connected by a cable 4.52 meters long, a discrepancy of only ~1 pixel.
