Space: Onward to Mars

A dramatic launch heralds a new era of missions to the Red Planet

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While the U.S. space program languishes, scientists from twelve European nations, the European Space Agency and the U.S. are participating in the Phobos mission, contributing technical expertise, instrumentation and onboard experiments to the Mars-bound ships. The U.S. is lending a hand with its superior Deep Space Tracking Network, which will aid the Soviets in navigating and keeping tabs on their craft. Another U.S. contribution, aboard one of the Phobos probes: a plaque honoring Astronomer Asaph Hall of the U.S. Naval Observatory, who in 1877 discovered Phobos and the other little Martian moon, Deimos (both named after the sons of the Greek god of war, and meaning fear and terror).

U.S. space watchers are impressed by the boldness, originality and scope of the Phobos operation. The twin Soviet probes will arrive at Mars in January 1989, easing into orbit about 4,000 miles above the planet's surface, or 140 miles higher than the orbit of Phobos. For four months the two probes will circle Mars in various orbits, peering down at possible future landing sites and using remote-sensing devices to investigate the landscape and weather.

Their scrutiny of Mars completed, first one probe and then the other will be sent by controllers to rendezvous with potato-shaped Phobos, which, like Deimos, is believed to be an errant asteroid that was captured by Martian gravity. Each craft, in turn, will descend as low as 100 ft. above Phobos. Maneuvering like cruise missiles, they will follow the contours of the landscape as their television cameras pick out surface features.

All the while, the versatile craft will be analyzing the composition of Phobos with two Buck Rogers-like devices. One, a laser beam only a millimeter in diameter, will vaporize first one spot and then another on the tiny moon, which is only 17 miles at its widest point, while an onboard instrument determines the chemical makeup of the vapor spewing up from each spot. Another beam consisting of krypton ions will bombard the moonlet, and an onboard mass spectrometer will identify the ions given off by the blasted surface materials.

Eventually each of the probes will release a lander that will rocket down onto the moonlet and shoot an attached "penetrator" into the surface as an anchor, essential because of the weak gravity (one-thousandth of the earth's gravitational pull). The solar-powered landers will then radio directly back to earth data on changes in the moon's gravitational field, thermal expansion and seismic noise. As if that were not enough, the frenetic probes will each drop a two-legged, domed "hopper" onto Phobos. After examining surface material and searching for magnetic fields at their landing sites, the hoppers will draw up spring-loaded, metal-alloy legs and, like giant frogs, leap about 20 yards to a new location, where the observations will be repeated. Each hopper is expected to make about ten leaps, reporting back each time by radio, until its battery runs out.

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