Suicide Space Robots

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

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Matt O'Dowd (1:03)

Thank you to 23andMe for supporting PBS Digital Studios. To unlock the mysteries of the universe, some sacrifices will have to be made. So far, the greatest, most noble deaths in the name of science have been those of robotic explorers. Let's take a moment to remember them.

Human space travel is tough. It takes a lot of tech to keep people alive up there and a lot more to bring them safely home. But we have few qualms about sending robots on one-way suicide missions to the stars. And it's not just that we have no intention of bringing them home. We've sent robotic probes into environments we knew full well would destroy them. And in some cases, the very destruction of these probes is part of the scientific experiment. Or in the case of the recent destruction of Cassini, to protect the solar system for future experiments. Today, we're going to memorialize the robots that have given their lives in the name of exploration. Venus, with its dense, searing hot atmosphere, is the most ravenous consumer of Earth-made landers. And the Soviet Union fed it the most. From 1966 to 1982, 12 probes from the Soviet Venera program were devoured by Venus' atmosphere. After a few probes were destroyed on descent, Venera 7 became the first ever man-made probe to land on another world in 1970 It fought against the blistering 445 Celsius heat and crushing 90 atmosphere pressure for 23 minutes before going quiet. This was just long enough to make the first ever transmission from the surface of another planet accurate temperature and pressure readings of the atmosphere that killed it. These measurements would have been impossible outside Venus' thick atmosphere.

Seven more generations of Venera probe landed on Venus, ultimately sending back our first images from the surface of another world.

Venus devoured all of them with Venera 13 surviving the longest at 127 minutes.

Mars is also a favorite destination for doomed robots. In some ways, it's harder to land things on Mars due to its extremely thin atmosphere, which makes parachuted-assisted soft landings very difficult. There's a rich history of robot death on Mars, from the ill-fated series of Soviet Mars landers, more like crash landers, to the notorious Mars climate orbiter which accidentally entered the Martian atmosphere due to a unit conversion error. But let's focus on the positive. The probes that, despite having no prospect of ever returning home, delivered far more science than anyone thought possible. I'm talking about NASA's Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. These identical probes touched down in early 2004 on what was planned to be a 90-day mission exploring the geology of the Martian surface. Their primary goal, to search for signs of past water activity.

But their doom was sealed before they launched. Their designers knew that the solar panels would soon be covered by Martian dust, drastically limiting their lifespan.

But this time, the alien atmosphere proved the savior, rather than the destroyer of robots. Right after landing, the power output of the rovers' panels dropped as expected. But then inexplicably, sporadic recoveries in power were observed. NASA scientists soon realized that the dust was being cleaned from the solar panels by the Martian wind. With help from these cleaning events, the rovers roved on, ultimately returning a wealth of evidence of Mars' watery past. Spirit finally succumbed to the dust beneath it, becoming stuck in a sand trap. It continued to transmit as a stationary science platform for over a year before we finally got our first contact in 2010 But at that point, the little rover had lasted 25 times its original mission plan.