This Is Why Russia Is Not on Mars - History of Russian Missions

hello wonderful person this is anton and welcome to mars today we're going to be talking about the history of missions to mars with a focus specifically on russia i'm going to explain why in a few seconds but first let's begin with this short video i have right here can you actually guess what this is showing to you and what is actually happening here you may already know what this particular event was or what this is showing if you don't know anything about this check out the video for this particular event in the description below it is actually totally worth watching it's about an hour long video but it talks about a mission known as mars 500. this incredible mission happened back in 2011 or about eight years from when i'm making this video and i believe i may have even applied for it i don't exactly remember if i actually went through the whole process of applications but i was kind of curious to participate in this um because this was when i was actually right after i tried to switch my careers this mission was basically a kind of an introduction to what it's like to live in complete isolation for 500 days and these people got paid for basically being kind of like lab rats and they stayed in that particular location somewhere in russia i don't exactly remember where it was uh essentially showing us what it's like to potentially live in these isolated conditions now this of course was when russia was specifically interested in going to mars and um they still kind of are there's still a talk of maybe even beating the americans to being the first to mars but russia does have a very unique and very interesting history with missions to mars as a matter of fact um of all countries that ever attempted to to be on mars and there's not that many actually but russia has the worst record ever russia has a lot of failures and this is why there's really no russian missions that have ever succeeded for longer than a few seconds on the martian surface there's only three missions that had partial success and of all of these missions which i'm going to discuss in a few minutes uh there's only one that actually was able to return any kind of useful data the mars iii mission that was launched back in 1971 uh was actually able to survive on the surface for um something like 20 seconds and was able to transmit this yep that's supposed to be the surface of mars or at least some kind of a signal coming from mars and that's really all uh soviet union got from this particular probe however marks three was actually a really interesting mission here's a an animation made in the 70s that demonstrated what actually happened here so the parachute would slow down the descent then the actual descent module would be um slow down further with a rocket engine and then you had the this egg that actually landed on the surface bounced around and once it was in a stable enough condition it would actually just kind of um open up and uh the egg was supposed to contain the actual camera module with this little rover guy that would move around and take some photos and transmit them back to earth it actually was a very sound mission it was very very interesting quite brilliant i even saw the mocap version of this particular probe with all of these specifications but of course things go wrong and in this case the probe didn't survive for very long and the soviet union had a little bit more luck with mars five which was the orbiter that took about 60 photos of the martian surface uh but then was um disabled by something and we think it was actually micro meteorite and the chance of that happening is pretty low so that already kind of goes to show you how unlucky in some sense russia was and it all began with karabol4 and karabul 5. this was back in 1960 way way way before the moon landing when the soviet union decided to launch this probe to mars and unfortunately it actually didn't even leave earth as a matter of fact the spacecraft exploded in the earth um atmosphere destroying everything and the same thing happened with coral 11 uh two years later so um basically this probe was doomed from the beginning and then they tried again in 1962 uh with mars one they thought that maybe by renaming this it will have better luck and they did but there was a communication problem despite a huge antenna here it um wasn't really working properly and may have actually been misaligned and so this mission uh had no communication and basically was abandoned as well and so they decided to try this again the corrobor mission was launched yet again in 1962 this was corrupt 13 and yet again unfortunately the mission failed and the craft fell apart on the transfer orbit to mars so two years later soviet union decided to create a new mission called zond2 and uh it was very similar to some of the previous missions but had more advanced communication satellite and ironically this also failed and so this mission was not able to communicate with earth and uh even though this was supposed to be a flyby of mars it never really worked as planned and at this point it became a kind of a minion race with nasa who was launching its mariner missions and so uh about five years later soviet union tried again with this much larger much more complex mission known as mars 1969 there were actually two launches and two probes but both failed on launch yet again and at this point i think someone in soviet union must have thought they are cursed because every single mission kept failing a much cooler much more advanced mission uh cosmos 419 was launched two years later in 1971 also failed and uh was actually stuck in orbit of earth for a little bit and then crashed back to earth but prior to the somewhat successful mars 3 that i previously mentioned mars 2 had very similar parameters but the actual egg-like apparatus crashed and was essentially destroyed on landing so no useful data um was acquired however this was the first sort of partial success i guess and it did kind of motivate the soviets to persist even more and try to launch a few missions following this and once mars 3 was actually able to transmit just a little bit of data and i guess show that this kind of technology could potentially work mark's 4 mission was launched very very similar to this but yet again failed this time completely missing mars and not even landing anywhere so that was quite embarrassing for the soviets and so they tried this mission a few times actually and unfortunately pretty much most of them failed mars 7 also missed mars completely only a few months later after mars four did and so i think at this point most people would actually just give up they would totally forget about it they would not even try but not in the soviet union they were competing with nasa they had to prove themselves and so they kept creating new missions and launching more spacecraft and so a decade passed and the soviets launched the phobos 1 and phobos 2 mission this was actually an extremely extremely interesting mission where the idea was to study the moons of uh mars specifically this moon right here phobos and the the idea here was that uh it would be a flyby and a potential landing as well but unfortunately for the soviets uh this time the computer failed and so both phobos 1 and phobos 2 missions were failures by the time they got to mars and then the soviet union ended but russia didn't stop there and as a matter of fact they tried again eight years later with the mission known as mars 96 in 1996 they launched um yet another mission and interestingly was based on all of the lessons from the previous experiences and had similar designs as well as a matter of fact the actual orbiter was based on phobos from 1988 and was an extremely expensive and also very complex probe with uh some of the parts from other european scientific communities and it even included a lender very similar to the original mars lenders that was supposed to actually study quite a lot of things that the inside mission to mars is studying right now it even had a very interesting penetrator probe that was supposed to drill deep inside martian surface and essentially study a lot of things that inside probe is doing right now but it's always about the weakest link and the weakest link here was the proton rocket right here unfortunately the stage separation didn't really complete correctly and also one of the stages didn't fire and so uh this beautiful probe that you see on the screen right here was supposed to be the salvation for the russian missions of the past but it wasn't it also failed and unfortunately this was the end of the russian attempts to bring anything to mars this is not to show that they're not going to try again but it is to show how extremely exceptionally difficult it is to get to mars and how to actually land anything on mars when it comes to space exploration no other planet has actually spurred as much excitement as mars has and the famous carl sagan once said mars has become a kind of a mythic arena into which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears it really shows you how despite all the failures we just keep trying and we kept trying to keep trying and luckily for nasa they are the only ones who have successfully landed every single uh scientific probe so far and because of the difficulties involved in landing anything on mars this is why it's kind of stressful to watch these guys try to actually communicate with the probes and waiting and waiting for the actual landing to occur and you probably remember this moment when they got really really excited about the actual landing when it actually happened nasa was going ballistic it was such an exciting event and that's because this officially gives nasa eight out of eight four landings on mars we have viking one and two back in 1976 we have pathfinder mission in 1979 spirit opportunity missions in 2004 phoenix in 2008 and curiosity in 2012 and lastly insight in 2018 this really shows you how exceptionally well nasa has perfected its skills at landing things and how um well really difficult it is because the soviets could never really do it correctly that's not to say that uh they were behind in terms of technology or understanding of how to land on objects it's just to show you how difficult it really is and the only country to actually have completely 100 success in terms of launching um anything to mars or really having missions to mars is actually not america the americans do have a lot of failures on mars as well it was this the indian mongolian probe that was launched in 2014 and created a record for the cheapest mission to mars as a matter of fact as i mentioned previously it's cheaper than the movie code mission to mars it was only 70 million dollars to launch the probe it's fully functional it's still operational it has actually been a tremendous success for the indian space program and most importantly it actually now has created a lot of new understanding of how to launch a successful mission to mars and following this a lot of people now expect india to be one of the first countries on the planet because they are definitely excited about the new interest in space exploration and most importantly um they're also capable of creating these incredible missions with absolutely stunning success rate their missions to the moon have actually been very successful and now uh they're obviously planning more in the next few years and so in summary out of about 50 missions in total only about 20 were actually partially successful and only about 15 or so were completely successful so this is an extremely difficult project it's an extremely difficult planet to get to and if we're going to be sending humans here we have to be very very very careful and this is actually why many people think that spacex may be rushing into things with their mission to mars because as of today not a lot of success has been seen even from really really big organizations like nasa this of course doesn't mean that we should not consider that mission to mars it just means that we need to really plan it super super carefully on that note that's actually all i wanted to show you in this video i really wanted to talk about why there are no russian missions here and emphasize the idea of the difficulty of getting to mars and landing on mars on that note thank you for watching i'll see you guys tomorrow uh come back tomorrow to learn something else hopefully you enjoyed this video and if you did don't forget to subscribe like this video and maybe even share this with someone who you think may enjoy watching videos about space space out and as always bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 61,314

Rating: 4.9343605 out of 5

Keywords: anton petrov, science, technology, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, amateur astronomy, steven universe, space engine, universe sandbox 2, russian space missions, russian space agency, roscosmos, mars russia, russia mars, mars 3, mars 5, why is russia not on mars, this is why russia is not on mars, martian missions, amazing martian missions, mars and russia, countries on mars, martians, martian, mission to mars

Id: 4Zxgnv6Uz2s

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2019