50 years ago, Russia landed on Mars for 15 seconds — and taught America a lesson - Inverse

Using a sophisticated landing system unmatched until later NASA missions like Pathfinder and Spirit, Mars 3 successfully landed on the Martian surface 50 years ago on December 2, 1971, becoming the first spacecraft to successfully complete a soft landing on another planet.

The Americans beat the Soviets in placing the first spacecraft in orbit around another planet with Mariner 9’s November 13 arrival at Mars, but the Soviets could still claim the first successful soft landing — even if the world would have to wait for the NASA’s Viking and later rover missions for the sorts of science Mars 3 would have conducted if it lived.

Mars 3 was actually two spacecraft, an orbiter and a lander, both “some of the most robust spacecraft that the Soviet Union had sent out into the Solar System,” Shindell says.

In that sense, sending spacecraft to orbit and land on Mars was a far greater technical challenge than landing on the Moon, and the Soviets wanted to get there first.

On May 10, 1971, the Soviets launched M-71S, which was intended to be a Mars orbiter but “got stuck in orbit around Earth because of a programming error in the timing of the upper-stage rocket,” Shindell says.

They were very different from the hexagonal design of NASA’s Mariner spacecraft, appearing bulbous or like spheres welded together, because that’s essentially what they were: The Soviet electronics required pressurized containers, Shindell says, so their spacecraft were just a series of those containers.

“The lander itself was kind of an egg-shaped spacecraft with these four petals that opened up after the soft landing was achieved.”.

The way the landers were to achieve that soft landing was incredibly innovative and sophisticated for the time, Shindell says.

It had been meant to be in orbit prior to the arrival in order to provide the Mars 2 and 3 landers with telemetry data for their high-speed approach to Mars, Shindell says.

“Mars 2 over-corrected as it turns out, and put the spacecraft into too steep of an angle of descent into the atmosphere,” Shindell says, and the lander crashed hard into Mars before it could even deploy its parachute.

“We don't know exactly why it failed,” Shindell says of the Mars 3 landers.

It’s hard not to speculate what the Mars 3 legacy might have been if the lander had survived intact.

The Mars 3 legacy might best be characterized then as an object lesson in persistence, and a reminder that even within the secretive Soviet space program, there worked individuals of extraordinary intelligence and creativity.

And on October 16, 2016, the Schiaparelli Mars lander technology demonstrator Russia built with the European Space Agency crashed into the Red Planet rather than making the intended soft landing

“Maybe that’s part of that [Mars 3] legacy that is very Russian,” Shindell says