{"id":1554,"date":"2013-08-05T05:58:05","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T09:58:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.graymanwrites.com\/blog\/?p=1554"},"modified":"2013-08-05T05:58:05","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T09:58:05","slug":"mars-6-launched-from-baikonur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/mars-6-launched-from-baikonur\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars 6 Launched From Baikonur"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forty years ago today — August 5, 1973 — the Soviet Union launched their third of four 1973 missions to Mars from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Proton K rocket.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n(Mars 6. Image from the National Space Science Data Center.)<\/em><\/p>\n

The Mars 6<\/a> “interplanetary station” featured a descent module that separated from the spacecraft bus to enter the Martian atmosphere. The bus continued on a flyby, while transmitting back telemetry.<\/p>\n

The first pair of the USSR’s 1973 Mars spacecraft<\/a> had launched in July, and reached Mars in February 1974. Mars 6 arrived at Mars on March 12, 1974.<\/p>\n

The descent module separated from the bus at a distance of 48,000 km from Mars. The bus continued on into a heliocentric orbit after passing within 1600 km of Mars. The descent module entered the atmosphere at 09:05:53 UT at a speed of 5.6 km\/s. The parachute opened at 09:08:32 UT after the module had slowed its speed to 600 m\/s by aerobraking. During this time the craft was collecting data and transmitting it directly to the bus for immediate relay to Earth. Contact with the descent module was lost at 09:11:05 UT in “direct proximity to the surface”, probably either when the retrorockets fired or when it hit the surface at an estimated 61 m\/s. Mars 6 landed at 23.90 S, 19.42 W in the Margaritifer Sinus region of Mars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mars 6 was the first spacecraft to send back data from Mars, though its lifespan was very short as indicated above.\u00a0It sent back a little under 4 minutes’ worth of data (224 seconds, to be exact).<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, much of the data were unreadable due to a flaw in a computer chip which led to degradation of the system during its journey to Mars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forty years ago today — August 5, 1973 — the Soviet Union launched their third of four 1973 missions to Mars from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a Proton K rocket. (Mars 6. Image from the National Space Science Data Center.) The Mars 6 “interplanetary station” featured a descent module that \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[26,85,11],"class_list":["post-1554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space","tag-launch","tag-mars","tag-space-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1555,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554\/revisions\/1555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}