Mars 96

Mars 96 began as Mars 92. NPO Lavochkin's plan, drawn up in the late 1980s on the strength of the Phobos spacecraft bus, was for a pair of vehicles carrying a 240 kg rover, a giant French balloon that would drift over the planet by day and settle on the surface at night, and a probe that would bury itself in the ground. A Soviet decree of 30 December 1988, the last government document on the subject before the union dissolved, authorised a Mars orbiter with a lander. Everything after that was subtraction. The rover went, the balloon went, France withdrew, the second vehicle went, and the 1994 launch window went too, for lack of money. What lifted off in November 1996 was a single spacecraft with two small landing stations and two penetrators. What survived the cuts, remarkably, was the science: instruments built by institutions in 22 countries and the European Space Agency, about twenty of them on the orbiter alone. The people building it were being paid late or not at all. At the press conference after the failure, the head of NPO Lavochkin said his staff earned 160 to 180 dollars a month and had just received their August and September wages, in November. During final assembly at Baikonur the stack would not fit inside the fairing, because the small landers were bigger than their own specifications said, so engineers cut a 30 cm segment out of the structure that held the high-gain antenna until it closed.

The launch, at 20:48:53 UTC on 16 November 1996 from the left pad at Site 200, went perfectly. Three Proton stages and the first burn of the Blok D-2 upper stage put the stack into a parking orbit near 160 km, and mission control began celebrating. The second Blok D-2 burn, 528 seconds long, was due 68 minutes and 53 seconds after liftoff, over the South Atlantic and out of sight of every Russian ground station. The Soviet programme had always parked a tracking ship there for exactly this moment; by 1996 the ships had been sold for scrap or laid up, and this was the first Russian interplanetary attempt flown without one. So nobody watched the burn and no telemetry of it exists. What is known is that it did not happen, and that the stage came away with a velocity gain of two or three metres per second, too little to say whether its main engine had lit at all. The spacecraft then did what it was programmed to do. Its control system, shared with the upper stage and mounted on the truss between them, was meant to measure the delivered impulse and adapt: if the accelerometers read healthy and the shortfall was too big to make up, the spacecraft's own engine would fire only an 8.5 m/s separation nudge. Instead the full burn ran, minutes early, in the wrong attitude and at the wrong point in the orbit. Its radial component lifted apogee to roughly 1,500 km and drove perigee down to 75 or 80 km, into the atmosphere. Mars 96 had aimed itself at the ground.

Then came the part the world heard about. The small stations and penetrators carried radioisotope units to keep them alive through Martian nights. At the Moscow press conference on 18 November, Russian Space Agency deputy director Yuri Milov gave the inventory: about 270 g of plutonium in eighteen capsules, four on each small station and five on each penetrator, each rated at 280 curies, the plutonium dioxide pressed into ceramic pellets at 1,200 degrees and sealed in a double shell of platinum-rhodium alloy and tantalum-tungsten inside a carbon-graphite jacket. None of that was clear to the outside world the day before. US Space Command was tracking exactly one object from the launch, gave it the designation 1996-064A and catalogue number 24656, and NASA's Orbital Information Group bulletins called it Mars 96 all through Sunday 17 November. It was the upper stage, which carried no plutonium whatsoever, and its ground track crossed Australia. President Clinton telephoned Prime Minister John Howard to warn him that a plutonium-carrying spacecraft might come down on his country and to offer American help with any cleanup; the Australian army and civil defence went on alert and the north and east of the country were put on notice. The stage re-entered harmlessly over the southern Pacific near 50.9 S, 168.1 W at about 01:20 UTC on 18 November. By then the actual spacecraft, and its plutonium, had been on the ground for more than twenty-four hours.

Where it came down is still unsettled. Russian ballistics specialists, reconstructing the orbit backwards from the upper stage and the logic of the flight programme, put re-entry between 00:30 and 01:30 UTC on 17 November and assumed the Pacific, because that was where the modelled perigee lay. James Oberg pointed out that the same window brackets South America. The US Space Surveillance Network logged an object entering at 00:49. In northern Chile, on a clear Saturday night, thousands of people watched a slow fireball shedding sparks travel from southwest to northeast; further south, an electronics specialist at the European Southern Observatory near La Serena watched it from a campsite and knew at once that he was seeing space debris. Luis Barrera of the Universidad Catolica del Norte in Antofagasta went out and collected the statements, visited the sighting points and reconstructed a track running from near Tocopilla toward Oruro in Bolivia. About two weeks after the event US Space Command revised its assessment: surviving debris would have fallen along a 200 mile stretch taking in the Pacific, Chile and Bolivia, an ellipse NSSDCA renders as 320 km by 80 km centred some 32 km east of Iquique. No search was ever mounted. Writing in New Scientist in March 1999, Oberg reported that Chilean witnesses had been told they had seen nothing important, that no piece of either vehicle had been recovered, and that neither government intended to look. Nothing has been reported found since.

The bill was modest by American standards and ruinous by Russian ones. The agency put the whole system, spacecraft plus rocket plus launch and control, at about 122 million dollars; foreign partners had spent perhaps 180 million more on instruments, taking the programme to roughly 300 million. Vasily Moroz had put the cost of the Mars-94 project, in 1989 prices, at 500 million roubles, about 660 million dollars at the official rate, for two spacecraft. Nothing was insured, because Russian law of the day did not let the agency buy insurance out of anything but profit, and there was no profit. RussianSpaceWeb calls the loss the start of a long hiatus in Russian planetary exploration, and it was: the next Russian planetary launch, Phobos-Grunt in November 2011, also failed to leave Earth orbit. The science, though, did not die with the spacecraft. Five instrument names from the Mars 96 payload list, HRSC, OMEGA, PFS, SPICAM and ASPERA, reappear on ESA's Mars Express, whose own mission page says the spacecraft borrowed technology from Rosetta and from Mars 96. Mars Express reached Mars in December 2003, and ESA was still publishing fresh Mars Express imagery in August 2026. The high-resolution stereo camera that never photographed Mars from a Russian orbiter has spent two decades mapping the planet from a European one. Two details are worth keeping, because they say what the era felt like from inside. The Novosti Kosmonavtiki account records in an aside that the Proton's second stage came down in its Gorny Altai drop zone and killed a cow. The same account closes with a rhyme then going round the space firms: the rocket flew, the rocket fell into a bog, and the wages you are paid are the work you get, more or less. Nobody at the press conference argued with it.