Mars 6
Soviet Mars lander lost contact during descent.
Last updated
Mars 6 (Марс-6), also known as 3MP No.50P, was a Soviet spacecraft launched to explore Mars. It consisted of a lander and a coast stage with instruments to study Mars as it flew past. The spacecraft was part of the Mars program and used a 3MP bus.
Spacecraft
The Mars 6 lander included a thermometer and barometer for measuring surface conditions, plus an accelerometer and radio altimeter to manage its descent. It also carried a mass spectrometer to analyze surface materials.
The coast stage, or bus, held a magnetometer, plasma traps, detectors for cosmic rays and micrometeoroids, and an instrument to examine proton and electron flows from the Sun. Lavochkin built Mars 6, the first of two 3MP spacecraft launched toward Mars in 1973, with Mars 7 following. Two orbiters, Mars 4 and Mars 5, launched earlier in the same window, were meant to relay data for the landers, but Mars 4 never entered orbit and Mars 5 stopped working after a few days.
Launch
Mars 6 launched on a Proton-K carrier rocket with a Blok D upper stage from Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 81/23 at 17:45:48 UTC on 5 August 1973. The first three stages placed the spacecraft and upper stage into low Earth parking orbit, then the Blok D fired to propel Mars 6 into heliocentric orbit toward Mars. A course correction was performed on 13 August 1973. The lander separated from the flyby bus on 12 March 1974 at an altitude of 48000 km from the Martian surface; the bus made a closest approach of 1600 km.
The lander entered the Martian atmosphere at 09:05:53 UTC, slowing from 5600 to 600 m/s in the upper atmosphere. A parachute deployed to further slow descent, and retrorockets were intended to fire in the last seconds before ground contact. The spacecraft returned data for 224 seconds during descent, but at 09:11:05 UTC, as the retrorockets were about to fire, all contact was lost. A design flaw had degraded a chip aboard the spacecraft during the mission, rendering much of the returned data unusable.
More in Derelict Satellites in Heliocentric Orbit
Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Mars 6 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Spotted an error? Know more?
Reader corrections go straight into our review queue. Suggest an edit · How this site is sourced