Mars 5M, also known as Mars 79 (russian: Марс-5М, or ) was a cancelled

Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, only being larger than Mercury. In the English language, Mars is named for the Roman god of war. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin at ...

sample return mission A sample-return mission is a spacecraft mission to collect and return samples from an extraterrestrial location to Earth for analysis. Sample-return missions may bring back merely atoms and molecules or a deposit of complex compounds such as lo ...

that the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

was planning in the 1970s.

History

Mars 5M grew out of the

Mars 5NM Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, only being larger than Mercury. In the English language, Mars is named for the Roman god of war. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosph ...

and

Mars 4NM The Mars program was a series of uncrewed spacecraft launched by the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1973. The spacecraft were intended to explore Mars, and included flyby probes, landers and orbiters. Early Mars spacecraft were small, and launc ...

missions that were canceled along with their intended launch vehicle, the

N1 rocket The N1/L3 (from , "Carrier Rocket"; Cyrillic: Н1) was a super heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to deliver payloads beyond low Earth orbit. The N1 was the Soviet counterpart to the US Saturn V and was intended to enable crewed travel to the ...

, in 1974. The following year, Soviet Minister of Defence

Dmitry Ustinov Dmitriy Fyodorovich Ustinov (russian: Дмитрий Фёдорович Устинов; 30 October 1908 – 20 December 1984) was a Marshal of the Soviet Union and Soviet politician during the Cold War. He served as a Central Committee se ...

, at the urging of Alexander Pavlovich Vinogradov, directed

Lavochkin NPO Lavochkin (russian: НПО Лавочкина, OKB-301, also called Lavochkin Research and Production Association or shortly Lavochkin Association, LA) is a Russian aerospace company. It is a major player in the Russian space program, being th ...

to develop 5M as a sample return mission to launch in 1980. The launch vehicle was to be the heavy

Proton A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol , H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 ''e'' elementary charge. Its mass is slightly less than that of a neutron and 1,836 times the mass of an electron (the proton–electron mass ...

rocket, using two rockets to send the lander out of Earth orbit to Mars, where it would land, collect samples, and separate for return, with a stage returning to Mars orbit to rendezvous with a return spacecraft delivered by another Proton. The return craft was originally to dock with a station in Earth orbit, though in the final design, which was completed in January 1976, had it travel directly to Earth after sterilizing the samples via heat. To save weight, the return craft would crash land on earth without parachutes, and would be located via a radioactive beacon. Though the Soviet government approved the mission, and production of equipment began in 1977, it was later deemed unfeasible and with proponent Vinogradov having died it was canceled by the end of the year.

References

External links

Encyclopedia Astronautica: Mars 5M
Cancelled spacecraft Mars program {{USSR-spacecraft-stub