Luna 1, the first escapee from Earth.

On this day in 1959, the Soviet Union launched a 4-foot-diameter metal ball — a close copy of the Sputnik satellite that had kicked off the space age two years earlier — in the direction of the moon. On January 4 Luna 1, also known as “Mechta” or Dream,  passed within 6,000 kilometers of the lunar surface. The Soviets had meant for it to hit the moon, and had loaded commemorative “pennants” on board that were supposed to scatter in every direction at the moment of impact. But a faulty rocket burn caused the probe to miss its target. Fifty-three years later, Luna 1, the first object to escape Earth’s gravity, is still in orbit around the sun.

In 1959, such a demonstration of Soviet rocket power didn’t sit well with American notions of technological superiority, and there was much fretting in the Western press. LIFE magazine editorialized about “The Warning of Mechta,” and pointed fingers at the politicians and bureaucrats. One writer named Lloyd Mallan took it a step further, claiming, in an article titled “The Big Red Lie,” published in the April 11, 1959 issue of True magazine, that the Soviets had made up the whole story about Luna 1.

After a long fact-finding trip (“14,000 miles behind the Iron Curtain”), Mallan concluded not only that “Lunik [the somewhat derisive nickname used in some American reports] does not exist and never did” but that “the Russians do not have any ICBMs,” and that the striking power of the Red Air Force had been greatly exaggerated. Mallan based his conclusions partly on the mistaken idea that no Westerners had heard signals from the Russian moon probe.

In August of that year, a Congressional fact-finding committee alarmed by Mallan’s claims heard different from people who actually knew what they were talking about.  William Pickering, head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told the committee that the Goldstone tracking antenna had detected signals from a spacecraft moving away from the moon on January 4. According to the committee report, “Dr. Pickering said there was no doubt in his mind that the object being tracked was the Soviet Moon rocket.” None of the expert witnesses doubted it, in fact.

During the hearings Mallan’s patriotism even came into question, based on his past involvement with communist-sympathizing groups during the Spanish Civil War. Although the hearings put to rest any serious possibility of Luna 1 being a hoax, Mallan went on to a dubious career debunking (usually erroneously) other Russian space achievements.

As for the Russians, they scored again later that year with Luna 3, the first spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon. Boris Chertok, a veteran of the cold war space race, wrote in his multi-volume memoir about those early days when his country was briefly ahead of the United States:

You can criticize the utopian plans for building communism, the trampling of human rights, and the Communist Party’s dictatorship in a totalitarian state all you want. But it is impossible to erase from the history of the Khrushchev era the favorable conditions created for developing cosmonautics and its related sciences. Cosmonautics did not arise simply from militarization, and its aims were more than purely propagandistic. During the first post-Sputnik years, the foundations were laid for truly scientific research in space, serving the interest of all humankind. All Soviet people, not just those of us who were directly involved in the missile and space programs, felt proud and were thrilled to be citizens of the country that was blazing the trail for the human race into the cosmos.

The Mariner 2 team at Cape Canaveral, shortly before launch. Jack James is marked by an arrow at right. (Courtesy Jack James)

Fifty years ago today, we became interplanetary explorers. NASA’s 447-pound Mariner 2 probe zipped past Venus at a distance of 21,564 miles, sending back data on temperature and magnetic fields — the first successful visit to another planet.

In December 1962 that was quite an engineering triumph, and the spacecraft — modeled after the then-disaster-prone Ranger lunar probes — barely survived its ordeal at Venus. In fact, it’s still amazing that a small team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who had never done any of this stuff before, was able to design, build, launch, and execute a successful planetary flyby, almost from scratch, in just a few months.

The project manager for Mariner 2 was Jack James, a Texas-born electrical engineer who had previously worked on missile programs at JPL. James wrote a memoir before he died in 2001; the following anecdotes from the Mariner 2 chapter are used here by permission of his son, Jack James.

In the rush to carry out the crash effort, errors were made. An error I actually enjoyed had to do with the quick rewriting of the Air Force contracts with [its launch contractors]. The young Air Force lieutenant who rewrote, negotiated, and had the contracts signed had been given verbal instructions. He apparently wasn’t too clear on the ultimate destination of this new mission. He had listed in the objectives of the contracts that they were to carry out a mission to Venice.

The flyby depended on the spacecraft’s ability to refine its course on the way to Venus, and one of James’ team doubted that the midcourse correction system could be ready in time to hit the summer 1962 launch window for Venus.

I consulted Dr. Homer Joe Stewart, who was serving in two posts: he was a key senior advisor to JPL, and at the same time a professor of aeronautics at Caltech. He was a man I thought a great deal of. I asked if we would be able to conduct a meaningful mission if we had no mid course correction system. In typical Homer Joe fashion—with a cigarette dangling from his lips and wearing a seersucker suit and tennis shoes—he went to a blackboard and started scribbling a lot of computations and drawings, most of which I did not follow. He concluded that the Atlas Agena injection accuracy alone would result in little chance of the spacecraft getting close enough to Venus to measure the magnetic fields or to make temperature measurements. He estimated that the mission would be primarily for national prestige by being the first spacecraft to go into the vicinity of a planet, but would not produce much in the way of scientific data.

James and another JPL manager, Bob Parks, then went to Washington and got NASA Headquarters’ permission — and the funding — to attempt the first American planetary mission.

Bob and I were staying in some old hotel I am certain was one that Lincoln had slept in. It had no air conditioning, but in those days hotel windows could be opened. To cool off a bit and celebrate, Bob and I, in our undershirts, took a bottle of Vodka, a bucket of ice, and some glasses, and walked up the staircase out onto the roof of the building. We gazed out at that great D.C. skyline and celebrated what we had accomplished and the uncertainties of what was about to begin.

In a 1987 interview to mark the 25th anniversary of Mariner 2, James recalled how the team worked long hours during the four months that their probe operated in interplanetary space.

I’d get called at all times of the night, you know, or I might be on travel. I was continually being called and given a report on things. My nerves had become so taut by this time, that I instructed everyone that would call me to start out with one of two sentences: “There is no problem,” or, “There is a problem.” I mean, just get it over with….Quite often, I got calls, “There is a serious problem.”

Mariner 2 survived, though, and returned data proving that Venus was oven-hot, and devoid of life (just as a young, not-yet-famous postdoc named Carl Sagan had predicted). The United States had beaten the Soviets (who had tried and failed to make a similar flyby) to Venus, and JPL had established itself as the world leader in planetary exploration, a position it still holds today.

As James wrote years later:

The science community was happy.
The NASA people were happy.
The newspaper people were happy.
The Campus was happy.
We were all happy.

Detail from a unique wide-angle hand mosaic of Surveyor 1's shadow on the Oceanus Procellarum, June 13, 1966. The mosaic is made of 66 gelatin silver prints in all, and measures 18 by 59 inches. (Each image mounted on the mosaic is approximately 6 by 6 inches.) The piece (lot #62) is estimated to go for $80,000 to $100,000. Photograph courtesy Bonhams auction house.

If you grew up near Bethpage, New York in the early 1960s, you probably were obsessed with the Apollo Lunar Module built by the Long Island-based Grumman Corporation. And if you were an extremely prescient teenager, you might have started amassing your own world-class collection of space-related items, including photographs, manuscripts, and prints.

Pierre Henri Puiseux and Maurice Lowey's large-format quadrant of the moon. Photograph courtesy Bonhams.

This Wednesday, Bonhams is auctioning off one such private collection. In a video on Bonhams’ Website, the collector (who wishes to remain anonymous) explains that he grew up “during the height of the windup to the Apollo era,” just a few miles from Grumman, and many of the fathers in his neighborhood worked on the Lunar Module. “I was working towards a goal fairly early on,” he recalls in the video. “In my early- to mid-teens, what I wanted to do was to have an exhibition focusing on unmanned space travel.”

Many of the items are one-of-a kind. The lunar photomosaic above (see the full image here), was made as a five-foot-wide presentation piece in 1966, and was painstakingly assembled by Kay Larson of the U.S. Geological Survey using images captured by Surveyor 1. “I’m lucky to have found this—it would have been thrown in the trash, eventually,” the collector notes.

John Russell's lunar globe, circa 1797. Photograph courtesy Bonhams.

There are objects relating to Mars, Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter, but Earth’s moon is the centerpiece of this show. Some of the items predate the space age. One particularly lovely object is a photograph made up of four large-format quadrants of the moon, taken in 1899, and probably created for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The photogravures, by Pierre Henri Puiseux and Maurice Loewy, were taken at the Paris Observatory. “It was only with NASA’s Lunar Orbiters in the 1960s,” reads the collection note, “that images substantially better than those of Loewy and Puiseux were obtained.” The plates are from Puiseux and Loewy’s Atlas photographique de la lune. The two men were able to photograph the moon only during perfect weather, the catalog notes, which meant just 50 or 60 nights each year—explaining why the Atlas took 14 years to complete. These may be the first oversize plates from the Atlas to come up for auction, and are expected to bring $12,000 to $18,000.

British pastel portraitist John Russell (the appointed painter to the King and the Prince of Wales) was so fascinated with the moon that he created a lunar globe in 1797, which he called a Selenographia. Russell spent many years drawing and observing the moon; his globe even accounts for lunar motion, or libration. No more than 11 Selenographias are believed to exist; six are in public collections. This example, lot number 23,  is expected to fetch between $200,000 to $300,000.

NASA has published another one of their cool, interactive roadmaps, like the one from last February that we enjoyed. Be sure to click through to the interactive full-size version to learn where NASA is headed in technology fields ranging from space power to nanotechnology and, of course, new launch systems.

MARDI's creator, Mike Malin, had to lie on the floor underneath the Mars rover so the camera could take this picture.

You have to give it to Mike Malin. He tried.

A couple of years ago, the planetary scientist who’s arguably the world’s foremost expert on Martian photography tried to convince NASA to include 3D video capability on the Curiosity lander that’s scheduled to touch down on Mars just after 1:30 am Eastern Monday morning. The 3D version of Malin’s Mastcam camera, as proposed by Avatar and Titanic director James Cameron, would have given us a “you-are-there” feeling of riding along with the rover as it trekked around the planet.

For defensible reasons, NASA decided not to include it.

But another Malin-built camera called MARDI — which, amazingly, was also initially axed by NASA cost-cutters — survived (barely — Malin had to put in his own money), and will film the rover’s descent as it drops to the Martian surface. Here’s NASA’s description of how it will work:

During the final few minutes of Curiosity’s flight to the surface of Mars, the Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will record a full-color video of the ground below. This will provide the Mars Science Laboratory team with information about the landing site and its surroundings, to aid interpretation of the rover’s ground-level views and planning of initial drives. Hundreds of the images taken by the camera will show features smaller than what can be discerned in images taken from orbit. The video will also give fans worldwide an unprecedented sense of riding a spacecraft to a landing on Mars.

MARDI will record the video on its own 8-gigabyte flash memory at about four frames per second and close to 1,600 by 1,200 pixels per frame. Thumbnails and a few samples of full-resolution frames will be transmitted to Earth in the first few days after landing….The full video — available first from the thumbnails in YouTube-like resolution and later in full detail — will begin with a glimpse of the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover. The first views of the ground will cover an area several kilometers (a few miles) across. Successive frames taken as the vehicle descends will close in and cover successively smaller areas. The video will likely nod up and down to fairly large angles owing to parachute-induced oscillations.

Many of the images may also be blurry, due to the motion of the camera. But hey, it’s video of a Mars landing, people!

I totally get that NASA has to draw the line somewhere at what to pack for its Mars expeditions, and Curiosity‘s managers struggled mightily even to stay within a bloated budget of $2.5 billion. But watch this video of the Huygens spacecraft descending to Titan’s surface in 2005, and tell me you don’t want to see the same thing (or hopefully better) on Mars.

August 6 update: Here’s a lo-res, incomplete version of the MARDI descent video.  A much better version will eventually be released.

Titan and Dione (the smaller moon) against the face of Saturn (Cassini image)

One of the solar system’s most interesting places just got even more interesting.

Scientists studying data from the U.S./European Cassini probe in orbit around Saturn report (in this week’s Science magazine) that the fog-covered moon Titan most likely has an ocean some 60 miles beneath its icy surface.

The Cassini team infers the ocean from the way the moon flexes due to gravitational tides as it circles Saturn.  The amount of flexing is greater than one would expect if Titan were made entirely of solid rock.

Titan — already the only place in the solar system beside Earth with surface lakes — now joins a small group of water worlds: Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, all moons of Jupiter.

The ocean had been predicted (below) but it’s nice to have empirical evidence.

What's underneath? And what's that red stuff? Thera Macula, as seen by the Galileo spacecraft.(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

The news that Russian scientists have finally drilled through the thick ice covering Antarctica’s mysterious Lake Vostok got me thinking, naturally, of Europa. Biologists hope to find previously unknown forms of life in Vostok, whose waters have effectively been sealed off from the outside world for eons. So, too, Jupiter’s moon might someday yield clues about — or even our first glimpses of — life beyond Earth. Europa is one of the first places to go if you’re searching for aliens, since it also has an ice-capped ocean.

Unfortunately, NASA’s planetary program is broke.

More about that in a minute. First, though, what could we do if we had the money? A team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has come up with a concept for a Europa Lander that could be launched as soon as 2021. There are other, competing Europa concepts — an orbiter and a multiple flyby mission — but the lander is to me (forgive my childishness) the coolest. And, as JPL’s Dave Senske told NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group yesterday, it would be the “most definitive way to assess what’s on the surface.”

The team envisions a six-legged spacecraft weighing about 100 pounds, which could last on Europa for about a month (Jupiter’s intense radiation limits the lifetime). Equipped with cameras, spectrometers, and a seismometer, the lander would drill or jackhammer a few inches into the ground to collect samples from below the radiation-contaminated zone. One likely landing site, called Thera Macula (above), is streaked with intriguing reddish material that may indicate the presence of organics. There’s reason to suspect that pockets of liquid water exist less than two miles below the surface at Thera Macula. Reaching those underground lakes might be a job for some future Europa cryobot, but not this first lander.

Nobody knows how rough the landing site would be. Galileo and Voyager photos aren’t detailed enough to answer the question, and according to some thinking, Europa’s icy surface could be as rugged as Death Valley’s “Devil’s Golf Course” (pictured below), which poses an obvious risk to a legged lander. Potential sites would have to be scouted from orbit during the month before landing, using a camera similar to the HiRISE now orbiting Mars.

Rough landing zone. (Photo of the "Devil's Golf Course" by Lluís Ribes Portillo)

The JPL team tried very hard to design a mission using technology that’s already, or almost already, in hand. True, nobody’s ever done a precision landing on another planet using LIDAR for last-minute hazard avoidance. But as study team members pointed out at the OPAG meeting, such technology has been in development for more than a decade. They think it’s doable. Which is exciting.

Now the bad news. The Europa Lander would cost as much as $3.5 billion, not counting launch. And NASA has no money for such ambition. The agency’s planetary exploration budget has just been slashed, partly a victim of its own excesses. The Mars program has been among the biggest offenders of late, but advocates of missions to the outer planets have proven little better at bringing down costs. NASA’s top science official, John Grunsfeld, was briefed about the new Europa concepts yesterday, and reportedly liked what he heard. The orbiter and flyby estimates both came in under $2 billion, which is better than previous Europa concepts. Still, Grunsfeld could only quip to the JPL briefers, “Now we just need $2 billion.”

Until something changes, then, we’ll have to settle for Lake Vostok, or science fiction — like this upcoming film, The Europa Report, which takes place, presumably, in some distant, less economically pinched future.

Part of the new geological map of Io published by the Planetary Science Institute and the U.S. Geological Institute.

Jupiter’s innermost moon, Io, is one of the most fascinating planetary bodies in our solar system — with hundreds of volcanoes, it’s the most geologically active, constantly reshaping its surface. Today a group at the Planetary Science Institute have released a new geological map of the moon, integrating four “global mosaics” produced by the United States Geological Survey in 2006. You can download the whole map here (PDF).

David A. Crown, a senior scientists at PSI, explained in the announcement why this map is special:

This new map of Io’s geology provides for the first time a detailed record of the different types of landforms and deposits that form the surface and presents a global context that is important for understanding Io’s internal evolution and volcanic processes, as well as for targeting future observations of Io. Knowledge of Io’s volcanic activity derived from geologic mapping is an important contribution to our understanding of the nature and diversity of volcanism in our solar system.

What makes the map even more interesting is that it’s based off of information collected mostly from the Voyager and Galileo missions. Yes indeed: spacecraft launched over thirty years ago and currently passing the boundary of our solar system are still giving us new things to think about. The two Voyager spacecraft made their closest approach to Jupiter in 1979, which was when we first discovered that Io was geologically active. Galileo, launched in 1989, deepened our knowledge of the Jovian moon though a number of close fly-bys, observing the effects of volcanic eruptions and imaging the surface to show the sheer extent of the activity.

That we can continue to parse this data to reveal even more about our neighbors is a testament to just how much data these planetary missions can dig up, and how much we still have to learn about our own solar system.

Stresses on Mercury's surface, which may have resulted from the cooling and solidification of either impact melt or volcanic fill. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

On a similar note — that is, space missions “living on” well past their standard mission dates, the MESSENGER spacecraft, in orbit around Mercury, just began its first extension this week. It launched in 2004 and entered Mercury’s orbit on March 18, 2011, with a planned mission end on March 17, 2012. NASA announced last November that the mission would be extended another year. The spacecraft is studying many of the same things at Mercury, including the history of its volcanism and how the planet’s topography has changed. As the team announced last October, they’ve mapped nearly the entire planet and are using it, along with data collected from Mariner 10 in 1974-75, to learn how Mercury was shaped by its volcanic activity.

An artist's conception of GJ 1214b

Astronomers announced this week that they’ve confirmed the existence of a new class of planet — a hot, watery, exotic “super-Earth.”

A little over two years ago, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered an exoplanet that we agreed was worth some extra attention. The planet, designated GJ 1214b, is only 2.7 times the diameter of Earth — one of the smallest exoplanets found — and orbits just over a million miles from its star (compare to Earth’s 92 million miles) in a zippy 38-hour ‘year.’

Given its size and density, astronomers speculated that GJ 1214b may very well be covered in deep oceans. The Harvard-Smithsonian team kept studying it, enlisting the Hubble Space Telescope to get more data about the planet’s atmosphere. “We’re using Hubble to measure the infrared color of sunset on this world,” said astronomer Zachory Berta in this week’s release. The data seem to confirm that GJ 1214b has a very steamy atmosphere, thick with water vapor.

Even more intriguing is that due to the temperature (being so close to its red dwarf star makes it around 450 degrees Fahrenheit) and extreme pressures, all that water gets a bit…exotic. Materials “like ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water’ – substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience” would form, according to Berta. We emailed Berta to ask if he could explain these strange materials further.

Frankly, it’s difficult for me to imagine what these exotic forms of water would be like – we have very little experience with them here on Earth. They’re simply how the molecule H2O acts when it is in high pressure and temperature environments …

Our closest point of comparison is that the outer atmosphere might be something like a hot, steamy oven that you would use to bake bread with nice crust. But as you go deeper into the planet, you would encounter these exotic forms of water. I should add, however, that there’s still an enormous uncertainty about the composition of the planet overall. Yes, the observations point to a planet that is rich in water, but what is it mixed with, and in what proportions? Really visualizing the “surface” of this planet (if there is one!) will require us figuring those things out!

But whatever the case, the temperatures are too high for liquid water as we know it to exist on GJ1214b.

We feel obligated to point out that if you’re going to google “hot ice” like we did, the first hit you get is this video; we asked Berta if that’s what he was talking about. He replied, “Sadly, I don’t think the YouTube video would be a great example. It shows water that’s saturated with sodium acetate, and the sodium acetate is crystalizing into the solid form. I’d really rather you didn’t link to it [ed note -- Sorry!], because that’s not what we think is going on.” OK, we crossed it off our “What Hot Ice Might Be Like” list.

Given the existence of water, we also asked Berta if he would “speculate wildly” on the question of life on GJ 1214b:

There’s probably no liquid water anywhere on this planet, so nope, I won’t speculate wildly about what sort of life could live there. Sorry! I can’t imagine it – the temperature would be too high for the large, complex molecules that make life possible to survive. But I will say this, which I think is an important point along the same lines:

What makes me excited about these observations is really the technique, the idea that we can use a telescope to observe the atmosphere of a very distant planet. GJ1214b is too hot for life, but it’s not too difficult for us to imagine that we could make similar observations of the atmosphere of a planet that was a little cooler in temperature than GJ1214b and could potentially host life. Microbial and plant life on Earth have dramatically altered our atmosphere over its history. If they did the same on another planet orbiting another star, observations like these of that planet’s atmosphere might then be able to tell us whether or not there is life elsewhere in our galaxy.

Sadly, the stripe for Russia’s Phobos-Grunt Mars spacecraft, currently incommunicado in Earth orbit, appears doomed to end at the outside, “fail” ring, which may also spell the end of the country’s planetary program.

The apparent demise of Phobos-Grunt got me reading up on the history of Russian Mars exploration, looking for stories from happier days.  I hadn’t known about PrOP-M, the first rover (or maybe crawler is a better word) launched to Mars. It ended up failing , too, but it would have been fun to watch had it succeeded.

By 1971 the Soviets had already landed one Lunokhod rover on the moon’s surface. The 10-pound PROP-M, included as a payload on the Mars 3 lander launched in May 1971, was much more modest.  After Mars 3 touched down, the rover, attached to a 15-meter umbilical cord, was designed to shuffle away from the lander on two ski-like contraptions. The video below (queued up here at the 3:51 mark) shows how the rover maneuvered itself.  Unfortunately, Mars 3 went silent immediately after it touched down, and PROP-M was never heard from again. NASA didn’t land its own rover on Mars until 1997, when Sojourner rolled off of the Mars Pathfinder.

When Curiosity touches down on Mars next August, it should tip its electronic head in the direction of PROP-M, wherever it lies on the unforgiving plains of Mars.

Apollo 11

Where were you on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon? What were you doing on October 4, 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik? Do you remember April 12, 1981, when the space shuttle Columbia made its first flight?

In 2008, the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival included the program “NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond,” and as part of that program, visitors were encouraged to document (written on note cards and recorded on tape) their memories of America’s space program.  A few of the festival-goer’s memories appear below.

As the 50^th anniversary year of human spaceflight draws to a close, we ask you to remember your own space milestones. After you read the remembrances here, leave a comment to tell us where you were, what you saw, and how you felt.

I had just learned to drive my husband’s stick shift car. He worked in the simulation lab with astronauts. I was stopped in front of their building to pick up my husband. As he got into the car, he said, “There’s Neil.” I said, “Neil who?” He said, “Armstrong! Who else?” At that point I went limp, the clutch jumped, the car lurched forward, and Neil just missed being hit.

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. I remember Werner von Braun was our most famous citizen. Huntsville was very sleepy until Sputnik was launched. All of a sudden, Huntsville became a hotbed of activity, all centered on the space program. Within three years, the U.S. had an active space program. Many of the engines for spacecraft were built in Huntsville. Huntsville calls itself “The Space Capital of the Universe” now. In 1950, it was known as “the Watercress Capital of the U.S.” Things change!

In 1957 Sputnik went up and the talk was that U.S. students had to catch up academically. I was 10 years old—the next day was the first time we ever had homework in school.

I was in second grade when the entire student body of Norfeld Elementary reported to the auditorium to watch a not-very-big portable black-and-white TV for a Mercury capsule splashdown in the Atlantic. We were all worried that it could miss and veer back into space forever. (It went OK.)

When I was in elementary school, a man came to the school and sang songs about Black Holes. Needless to say, I was terrified.

I’ve been fascinated by space exploration for my entire life. My family tells me that my first word was “moon.” Now I work as a NASA contractor, on a mission to the Moon (LRO). I’m grateful to be standing on the shoulders of giants, the men and women before and beside me that helped NASA and all space agencies achieve what they have. And we’re only at the beginning of the adventure.

Phobos as viewed (in false color) by NASA's HiRISE camera in 2008.

Mars has not been a happy place for the Russian space program. The nation’s attempts to explore the Red Planet, going back more than 50 years, have produced a long litany of failures. The most recent misfire came 15 years ago, when the instrument-laden Mars 96 probe, instead of heading out into the solar system, burned up in the atmosphere and scattered pieces over Chile and Bolivia.

That crash effectively put the Russian planetary program out of business — until now.

On Tuesday a Zenit rocket is scheduled to lift off from Kazakhstan to start the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft on its 10-month voyage to Mars. If all goes well, on Valentine’s Day of 2013, after several months of circling the planet, the lander will touch down on the surface of the moon Phobos to start collecting samples of dirt (“grunt” in Russian). Four days later, a return vehicle will lift off in the moon’s low gravity and bring the samples back to Earth.

We’ll have more details on the Phobos-Grunt mission next week. Meanwhile, here’s some background from Anatoly Zak, the author of our 2008 article, and an animation (with Russian subtitles) from the Roscosmos space agency that shows how it’s all supposed to go.

Which is why I find maps like this so appealing. A research team led by the University of Nantes in France stitched together six years’ worth of infrared images taken by the Cassini spacecraft over the course of 70 Titan flybys to produce a global mosaic. Because infrared penetrates the clouds, the surface is revealed. In this false-color composite, highlands appear bright and equatorial dune fields appear dark.

The mosaic varies in resolution, depending on how close Cassini was to the surface at the time a particular image was taken. But some of the fuzzy areas will get sharper. Another 48 Titan flybys are planned between now and 2017.

Apollo 11 moon rocks. Photo credit: NASA

This recently found moon rock is one of about 200 small fragments presented as gifts to foreign nations, U.S. states and territories. All were sliced from a single Apollo 17 sample, number 70017, and many are unaccounted for today. Various investigations have been pursued over the years to track down these and other missing moon rocks, including Operation Lunar Eclipse, the joint sting operation between NASA, the U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Customs that recovered the Goodwill Moon Rock originally given to Honduras.  Another somewhat famous escapade includes the interns at Johnson Space Center who smuggled out a 600 pound safe containing samples from all the Apollo missions (the F.B.I. caught them).

NASA’s Office of the Inspector General keeps tabs on any information surfacing about moon rocks, both to collect missing pieces and to sweep counterfeit rocks off the market. Updates are published in the office’s semi-annual reports — just last year they recovered a Goodwill Moon Rock intended as a gift to Cyprus (pdf), however, “The plaque had been intended for delivery by a U.S. diplomat to the people of Cyprus as a gift when hostilities broke out in that country. The plaque had remained in the custody of the diplomat until his death and was recovered from his son.”

Wikipedia’s moon rocks page collects more stories, such as the ill-fated gift to Ireland: the Apollo 11 rock ended up in a landfill. (Their Apollo 17 rock is safe in a museum, at least.) Clearly, some of these will never be recovered.  But sometimes, every once in a while, you can just open a box.