Toward the Red Planet

Having lost the race to the moon, the Russians are clearly determined not to arrive second in other areas of space. Though last month's linkup of a manned spaceship with a larger unmanned vehicle was apparently marred by difficulties, it showed the keen Soviet interest in establishing the first earth-orbiting space station. The Russians are also aiming at more distant targets. Last week they launched a massive, 10,230-lb. spacecraft toward Mars.

The purpose of the six-month, 290,000,000-mile flight, the Soviets said, was to conduct scientific investigations of the Red Planet. But the great weight of the spacecraft immediately suggested the possibility that the Russians may attempt a soft landing. The U.S. is not scheduled to launch its Viking soft-lander instrument package toward Mars until 1975. Said NASA's Deputy Administrator George Low of the Russian effort: "I hope it gets there, and I hope we share with them in the data."

Low also disclosed the results of the intense investigation into why the Atlas-Centaur launch vehicle had sent the U.S. Mars orbiter, Mariner 8, plunging into the Atlantic only minutes after takeoff. The failure occurred, he said, when the rocket's autopilot circuitry was damaged by a surge of voltage. NASA officials believe that a recurrence of the problem can be avoided on Mariner 9, which they hope to launch by mid-June; after that Mars will not be in a favorable position for another two years.

Even as their own Mars vehicle raced toward its goal, the Soviets had another reason to be pleased. Six months after its landing, the eight-wheeled moon rover, Lunokhod I, was still continuing its lunar explorations, digging up soil samples with a conical drill and analyzing them with on-board instruments. It was also photographing the moonscape and scanning the heavens with an X-ray telescope that has already detected at least two sources of X-ray emissions in distant space. So overjoyed were the Russians by Lunokhod's performance that Pravda was moved to proletarian metaphor and compared the little vehicle to a faithful "workhorse that toiled from dawn till sunset."

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