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Mars

The year 1994 was supposed to witness the launch of the now-international Mars-94 spacecraft, designed to place a heavy platform into Mars orbit and to drop four small probes onto the Martian surface. Originally conceived as the Columbus Project with a 1992 launch date, Mars-94 was redefined and simplified several times before its rescheduled launch in October, 1994, with only a single spacecraft. The Russian-led mission now included substantial participation from the former Soviet bloc nations, France, Germany, UK, Japan, US, and others - more than 20 countries in all.

The cruise spacecraft is shown with the surface experiments on board during the journey to the Red Planet after launch by a Proton booster. A few days before reaching Mars, the two small station surface probes are released for a direct entry into the Martian atmosphere. The two penetrator probes are released from the mother spacecraft after a stable Mars orbit has been obtained. All four landers will be powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) to permit lifetimes of up to one year. The orbiter will revolve about Mars in highly elliptical, 12-15 hour orbits to carry-out its own intensive survey of the planet and to serve as a data collector from the surface instruments. The scientific program is managed by the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Space Research, while the Babakin Engineering and Research Center of the Lavochkin Scientific Production Association is responsible for most spacecraft hardware, excluding the scientific instruments (References 160-162).

From high hopes and strong commitments in early 1993, the Mars-94 program began to gradually unwind as the year progressed with severe doubts by the end of the year that the launch schedule could be achieved (References 163-171). By April 1994, just six months before, the planned lift-off of Mars-94, the Russian Space Agency decided the mission would have to be postponed until the next flight opportunity in 1996. Unfortunately, the launch window for the newly rechristened Mars-96 will not be as favorable as the 1994 window, leading to a reduction in payload or equally undesirable changes in the flight profile. By the end of 1994 worries about a complete cancellation of the project had surfaced (References 172-179).

The two-year delay for the former Mars-94 had the expected domino effect of revising the original Mars-96 mission launch to 1998, thereby changing its name to Mars-98. The main Mars-98 scientific payloads are an atmospheric balloon probe and a miniature Mars rover, both originally envisioned for the 1992 Columbus Project, temporarily moved to Mars-94, and then manifested on Mars-96 (now Mars-98). The balloon probe is primarily a Russian-US-French undertaking with a total mass of 65 kg and a design life of 10 days during which it may travel up to 1,500 km across the planet, dragging an instrumented package along the surface each night. The rover is a product of the Russian Institute of Transport Mechanical Engineering with a mass of 75-80 kg, a width of 0.95 m and a length of 0.7-1.2 m, depending upon the terrain. Like the Mars-96 landers, the rover will be powered by a small RTG. The Mars-98 main spacecraft will relay data from the balloon and rover to Earth from its orbit about Mars. Engineering models of the balloon and the rover have been undergoing extensive tests on Earth for several years. However, by late 1994 new concerns about the viability of Mars-98 were raised, including the possibility that the payload would be dramatically downsized to accommodate a launch by a Molniya rather than a Proton booster (References 180-195).