To what extent has the solar system been studied: how did humanity move into space and when will it master new worlds?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

We all understand how rockets take off, but we rarely think about the fact that cosmonautics is multifaceted, and among other things, as a result, the tasks of landing and ensuring activities are set.

When did astronautics start?

This question is very important, because when it began, the function was completely different - a person launched the first man-made product into space fifteen years earlier than the first satellite. It was a V-2 combat missile, created by the brilliant German engineer Werner von Braun. The function of this rocket was to fly to the spot and not land, but to inflict damage. These rockets served as the impetus for the beginning of astronautics in general.

After the war, when the victors began to divide the property of defeated Germany, the Cold War, although it did not begin, but, let's say, there was a note of rivalry in these actions. The seized technical and scientific documentation was counted not by the number of pages, but in tons. The Americans showed the greatest zeal: according to official data, they removed 1,500 tons of documents. Both the British and the Soviet Union tried to keep up with them.

At the same time, before the "iron curtain" fell on Europe, and the term "cold war" came into general use, the Americans willingly shared the obtained documents and descriptions of German technologies. The special commission regularly published collections of German patents that anyone could buy: both American private companies and Soviet structures. Have Americans censored what they publish? I think the answer is obvious.

The hunt for documents was complemented by a large-scale recruitment of German scientific personnel. Both the USSR and the United States had the potential for this, albeit fundamentally different. Soviet troops occupied large German and Austrian territories, where not only were many industrial and research facilities located, but also valuable specialists lived. The States had another advantage: many Germans dreamed of leaving Europe torn apart by the war across the ocean.

The US intelligence services conducted two special operations - Paper clips and Overcast, during which they combed the German scientific and technical community with a fine comb. As a result, by the end of 1947, 1,800 engineers and scientists and more than 3,700 members of their families had gone to live in their new homeland. Among them was Wernher von Braun, although this is only the tip of the iceberg.

US President Harry Truman ordered not to take Nazi scientists to the States. However, the executors in the special services, who understood the situation better than the politician, so to speak, creatively rethought this order. As a result, recruiters were ordered to refuse relocation to anti-fascist scientists if their knowledge was useless for American industry, and to ignore the "forced cooperation" of valuable personnel with the Nazis. It so happened that mainly scientists with similar views went to America, which did not cause, for example, ideological conflicts.

The Soviet Union tried to keep up with the Western "winners" and also actively invited German scientists to cooperate. As a result, more than 2,000 technical specialists went to get acquainted with the industry of the USSR. However, unlike the United States, the vast majority of them soon returned home.

By the end of the war, there were 138 types of guided missiles in various stages of development in Germany. The greatest benefit to the USSR was brought by the captured samples of the V-2 ballistic missile, created by the brilliant engineer Werner von Braun. The revised rocket, free from a number of "childhood diseases", was named R-1 (Rocket of the first modification). The work on bringing the German trophy to mind was supervised by none other than the future father of Soviet cosmonautics - Sergei Korolev.

Left - German "FAU-2" at the Peenemünde range, right - Soviet P-1 at the Kapustin Yar range

Soviet specialists actively studied the experimental anti-aircraft missiles "Wasserfall" and "Schmetterling". Subsequently, the USSR began producing its anti-aircraft missile systems, which unpleasantly surprised American pilots in Vietnam with their effectiveness. German jet engines Jumo 004 and BMW 003 were exported to the USSR. Their clones were named RD-10 and RD-20 (Rocket engines and modification number). Due to the latest modifications of the RD series engines, today, as you know, there is a lot of hype. Soviet submarines, weapons, including nuclear weapons, and even a Kalashnikov assault rifle, to one degree or another, have German prototypes. In general, it can be said without a shadow of a doubt that German scientists gave a serious impetus to the development of science throughout the world in general and astronautics in particular. But such a story is worthy of a separate article.

America and the Soviet Union have long competed with each other in mastering the technologies they inherited after the war. But, unfortunately, in view of the fact that America has had a more stable political system throughout its history, while in our country there was a global change and we stalled for a long time, Russia today is seriously lagging behind the United States in the space race.

We return to astronautics

FAU-2. A combat missile created in 1942. Its height is 14 meters, weight is 12.5 tons, maximum altitude of vertical flight is 208 km.

The rocket, which was able not only to launch the cargo into space, but also to provide it with the first space velocity, thanks to which the device entered a circular orbit around the Earth, was created at the Design Bureau under the leadership of Korolev. This is no less great rocket - R7 (Rocket 7th modification). In fact, it has survived to this day, having undergone minimal changes (the main component, the first stage, has not changed at all).

Family of missiles based on R 7

On October 4, 1957, R7 launched the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit

Both this and the following satellites (most of the current ones) are not supposed to be planted anywhere. Their fate lies in the fact that after working out their function, they are destroyed when entering the dense layers of the atmosphere.

The first living beingsalso, unfortunately, no one expected to return to Earth.

The first living creature in outer space was a mongrel named Laika

This experience has shown that one can live in outer space (using the appropriate apparatus). And the well-known Belka and Strelka were the first to return to Earth alive after a space flight, showing the fundamental possibility of returning.

The first flights to other planets also did not involve landing

The moon is quite a planet. It is very good that it is located close to us - so we can work out technologies for further expansion, study, development, etc.

On November 12, 1959, it was launched, and on November 14 at 22:02:24 a hard contact was made with the Moon near the southeastern Sea of Rains, the Lunnik Bay (rotting swamp) of the Soviet "lunar".

Model of the Soviet spacecraft "Lunnik-2"

The task of landing on the moon is generally quite difficult. The device arrives at it at a speed much higher than that with which it could enter orbit around the Moon (direct landing, without braking in orbit, even today is not possible due to the lack of appropriate technologies), since it has practically no magnetic field. When we send the device, which must crash into the surface of the Moon, as it was with the first "Lunnik", it reaches the target at a speed of 2 km / sec. Artillery shells, for example, fly at a speed of up to 1 km / s, that is, Lunnik's kinetic energy is 4 times greater. Upon impact on the lunar surface, the apparatus simply evaporates (the so-called thermal explosion). The achievement, as usual, was supposed to be fixed. The apparatus included "Pennants of the USSR" made of stainless steel, which were assembled in the form of a sphere. The problem was solved in a very interesting way so that these icons do not collapse. Explosives were placed inside the sphere, which exploded when the probe of the "Lunnik" touched the surface of the moon. One half of the apparatus, thus, accelerated towards the Moon, and the second flew away from it, slowing down its fall, and not collapsing. Several dozen of these pennants are now lying on the moon. The approximate zone of their spread is known with an accuracy of 50x50 kilometers.

This was the first ever interplanetary flight.

In those years (mid-60s), the Americans began to catch up with the USSR. They had a series of Ranger ships that also crashed on the surface of the moon, but they had television cameras that broadcast images as they flew towards the moon. The last pictures were transmitted from a distance of 300-400 meters.

The Americans intended to deliver scientific equipment to the surface of a natural satellite. To solve this problem, there was a wooden balsa box on top of the spacecraft, into which these devices were placed. It was hoped that this tree would soften the blow, but everything was shattered.

Ranger series apparatus

For the first time, the USSR managed to make a soft landing on the surface of a space body by landing Luna-9. Both the USSR and the USA were already preparing to send a man to the moon in those years. But there was no exact information about what the lunar surface is. In fact, scientists were divided into two camps. Some believed that the surface was solid, while others believed that it was covered with a thick layer of fine dust that would simply suck in everything and everyone. So, Sergei Korolev belonged to the first camp, as evidenced by his note kept in the RSC Energia museum.

In those years, only successes were reported. And the message in the newspaper and on the radio read: "The first flight to the Moon on February 3, 1966 ended with the successful landing of the Luna-9 apparatus." Before that, only Luna-3 was reported. As it became known much later, 10 launches to the Moon ended in failure, to the point that the rocket simply exploded at the start. And only the 11th (for some reason "Luna-9") was successful.

In this case, you can not stop praising Soviet engineers. Although, as mentioned at the very beginning, scientists from defeated Germany participated in this program. For example, even a volcanologist - Heinrich Steinberg. There was practically no electronics. To separate the payload, a probe was installed, which "reported" about the touch, and an airbag was inflated around the vehicle, which dropped it. The apparatus was ovoid with a shift in the center of gravity to stop in the desired orientation. For the first time, images of the surface of another planet were obtained.

Spacecraft with payload

Scheme of separation of the payload upon delivery to the lunar surface

The world's first photographs of a space body obtained by the Luna-9 apparatus

A year later, the Americans solved this problem much more gracefully (they had already begun to overtake the USSR). By that time, their computers were an order of magnitude better than those of the USSR. They, without any airbags, on jet engines, landed several of their Surveyors. Moreover, these vehicles could turn on their engines repeatedly and jump from one place to another. But here the USSR benefits from the fact that very few people remember the latter.

Surveyor Series

Then the planting of machine guns continued. Soviet moon rovers … They were already much more advanced and, one might even say, graceful. The landing platform landed on jet engines. Then the ramps were opened and a huge car weighing almost a ton drove down along them, which drove tens of kilometers along the lunar surface. Electronics was still poorly developed (for example, a camera in a mobile phone weighs 1 gram, and two television cameras, 12 kilograms each, were installed on the lunar rovers) and operators controlled the lunar rovers from Earth by radio communication.

Lunokhod landing scheme

Photo of the landing platform taken by Lunokhod 1

Photos taken by lunar rovers

The last submachine guns were the Soviet Luna series. Luna 16 delivered soil from the Moon to Earth. In this case, the problem was solved not only landing on the moon but also returning back to Earth.

Finally, the era of manned flights into outer space has come

They all flew the P7. Here the Soviet Union was able to overtake the United States due to the fact that our hydrogen bomb was much heavier than the American one, namely, the "seven" was created to deliver the bomb. Due to the carrying capacity, the first ship "Vostok" could be made heavier by adding a large number of redundant systems, which made it very safe.

The spherical shape of the Vostok descent vehicle is explained by the fact that at first they did not know how to control the descent when entering the atmosphere. The descent vehicle rotated during its fall in all three planes, and the only shape that could provide a more or less safe entry into the atmosphere during such a descent is a ball. The temperature on the surface of the apparatus during the passage of dense layers reaches 2000 degrees Celsius. They could not provide a soft landing, so the cosmonaut ejected a few kilometers from the surface, when the descent vehicle itself was already descending (very quickly) by parachute in the Earth's atmosphere.

"Vostok" became the prototype of the current "Unions". When approaching the surface, the ship is divided into three parts with the help of fire bolts, two of which are burned up. The descent vehicle in the atmosphere descends by parachute, but just before touching, jet engines (powder) are turned on, which literally work for a second. Just in case, the capsule is made so that it doesn't drown in water either.

Image from NASA website

The first American astronauts had less technology than ours. Their bomb was lighter and the missile was made to match. Their spacecraft did not have a sufficient number of redundant systems, but the first flight of the astronaut was successful.

Flights to the Moon

The task was complicated by the fact that the flight involved two landings - on the surface of the Moon and then return to Earth. To carry out the flight, the Saturn-5 Rocket was created. And it was created by the same brilliant engineer Wernher von Braun. It turns out that he opened the way to space and he also paved the way to the moon during his life - the greatest achievements for one person.

Image from NASA website It can be downloaded and viewed in detail

The first flights were without landing on the moon. We flew on the Apollo ship. The first landing flight is the Apollo 11 mission. Two crew members "landed" on the lunar surface, the third remained in the orbital module to monitor the mission.

Flight scheme to the moon

The USSR also developed a lunar program, but lagged behind the United States and did not implement it. A flight scheme of two crew members was assumed, and only one was supposed to come to the surface of the moon. The first Soviet cosmonaut (and indeed the first person) to set foot on the moon was supposed to be Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov.

Project of the Soviet lunar takeoff and landing module

In the design of the Apollo descent vehicle, the problem of a controlled entry into the atmosphere was solved.

Few people know, but the first flights with the return of living beings after the flight of the Moon were made by Soviet devices of the "Probe" series. The passengers were turtles.

Apparatus series "Probe"

Luna today operates American spacecraft LRO and LADEE and two Artemis, and on its surface - the Chinese "Chang'e-3" and the lunar rover "Yuytu".

The LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) has been operating in circumlunar orbit for almost five years - since June 2009. Perhaps the most interesting scientific result of the mission was obtained using the Russian-made LEND instrument: a neutron detector discovered water ice reserves in the polar regions of the Moon. The LRO data showed that neutron radiation “dips” are recorded both inside the craters and in their vicinity. This means that ice reserves are not only in the constantly darkened "cold traps", but also nearby. This served as a new round of interest in the development of a natural satellite of the Earth.

After the Moon - the era of reusable spacecraft - shuttles

Disposable astronautics are very expensive. It is necessary to create a huge complex rocket, spacecraft and they are used for only one trip. As usual, both the USA and the USSR worked on reusable spacecraft, but unlike America in the history of our country, this project can be called a colossal failure - all the money of the space program was spent on the creation and first launch (including the Energia rocket), after which the operation did not take place.

When returning, the shuttle is essentially a glider, since there is no fuel left. It enters the atmosphere with its belly, and when the dense layers are passed, it switches to aircraft gliding. After 30 years of operation, the shuttles have become history - the fact is that they were too heavy-lifting. They could put 30 tons of cargo into orbit, and now there is a tendency to reduce the weight of the spacecraft, which means that the less from the payload the shuttle will launch, the more expensive the cost of each kilogram of cargo becomes.

One of the most interesting shuttle missions was the STS-61 Endeavor mission to repair the Hubble telescope. In total, 4 expeditions were carried out.

At the same time, thirty years of experience was not wasted and the shuttles were developed in the form of a military free-flying module X-37.

The Boeing X-37 (also known as the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV)) is an experimental orbital aircraft designed to test new technologies. This reusable unmanned spacecraft is designed to operate at altitudes of 200-750 km, and is capable of rapidly changing orbits and maneuvering. It is supposed to be able to carry out reconnaissance missions, deliver small cargoes into space (and also return).

One of his records is that he spent 718 days in orbit, landing on the Kennedy Space Center landing strip on May 7, 2017.

The moon has been mastered. Next - Mars

Many robots have flown to Mars and they mostly work in the form of orbiters.

Completed missions to Mars

In May 1971, the Soviet MARS-2 spacecraft reached the surface of the Red Planet for the first time in history.

To be sure, 4 devices were sent at once, but only one flew.

Landing scheme of SC "Mars-2"

At the same time, a strange story happened with the device. He sat down in the southern hemisphere, at the bottom of the Ptolemy crater. Within 1.5 minutes after landing, the station was preparing for work, then began transmitting a panorama, but after 14.5 seconds, the broadcast stopped for unknown reasons. The station transmitted only the first 79 lines of the photo-television signal.

The device also included the first book-sized rover, although very few people know about this either. It is not known whether he "went", but he should have walked.

The first ever rover

In December of the same year, the Mars-3 AMS (automatic interplanetary station) made a soft landing and transmitted the video to Earth.

All robots, except Phoenix and Curiosity, landed on the surface of Mars using airbags.

Phoenix sat on jet brake engines. Curiosity had a state-of-the-art system to ensure the most accurate landing - using a jet platform.

Venus

Flights to Venus began at the same time as to Mars - in the 60s of the 20th century.

The first vehicles perished because there was no reliable information about the atmosphere of Venus. Through the telescope, it was clear that the atmosphere was very dense and the first devices were made at random with a pressure margin of up to 20 Earth atmospheres. As a result, we made apparatus of the Venera series, capable of withstanding a pressure of 100 atmospheres.

At first, the device descended by parachute, but at an altitude of about 30 kilometers from the surface of Venus, the parachute was dropped. Venus's atmosphere was so dense that a small shield was enough to slow down the entire craft and land it gently.

The device worked there (almost 500 degrees Celsius on the surface) for about 2 hours. Thus, the first images from the surface of Venus, as well as the composition of its atmosphere, were obtained in the Soviet Union.

The Americans have not been as successful. None of their probes were able to work on the surface.

Jupiter

Landing on it is, in principle, impossible, since it is assumed that it simply does not have a solid surface.

Research began with NASA's Pioneer 10 unmanned spacecraft mission in 1973, followed by Pioneer 11 a few months later. In addition to photographing the planet at close range, they discovered its magnetosphere and the surrounding radiation belt.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 visited the planet in 1979, studied its satellites and the ring system, discovered the volcanic activity of Io and the presence of water ice on Europa's surface.

Ulysses carried out further studies of the Jupiter magnetosphere in 1992, and then resumed its study in 2000.

Cassini reached the planet in 2000 and captured highly detailed images of its atmosphere.

"New Horizons" passed near Jupiter in 2007 and made improved measurements of the parameters of the planet and its satellites.

Until recently, Galileo was the only spacecraft that entered orbit around Jupiter and studied the planet from 1995 to 2003. During this period, Galileo collected a large amount of information about the Jupiter system, coming close to all four of the giant Galilean moons. He confirmed the presence of a thin atmosphere on three of them, as well as the presence of liquid water under their surface. The craft also discovered a magnetic field around Ganymede. Upon reaching Jupiter, he observed the collisions with the planet of the fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy. In December 1995, the spacecraft sent a descent probe into Jupiter's atmosphere, and this mission for close exploration of the atmosphere is the only one of its kind. The speed of entry into the atmosphere was 60 km / s. For several hours, the probe descended in the atmosphere of the gas giant and transmitted chemical, isotopic compositions and many other extremely useful information.

Today Jupiter is being studied by NASA's Juno spacecraft.

Shown below are recent footage of Juno's flight over Jupiter, processed by Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran. Here you will find latitudinal cloud layers, hurricanes, vortices, and the planet's north pole. Fascinating!

Saturn

Only four spacecraft have studied the Saturn system.

The first was Pioneer 11, which flew by in 1979. He sent low-resolution images of the planet and its satellites to earth. The images were not clear enough to make it possible to make out in detail the features of the Saturn system. However, the apparatus helped make another important discovery. It turned out that the distance between the rings is filled with an unknown material.

In November 1980, Voyager 1 reached the Saturn system. Voyager 2 reached Saturn nine months later. It was he who was able to send photographs of much higher resolution to Earth than his predecessors. Thanks to this expedition, it was possible to discover five new satellites and it turned out that the rings of Saturn are composed of small rings.

In July 2004, the Cassini-Huygens apparatus approached Saturn. He spent six years in orbit, and all this time he photographed Saturn and its moons. During the expedition, the device landed a probe on the surface of the largest satellite, Titan, from where it was possible to take the first photographs from the surface. Later, this device confirmed the existence of a lake of liquid methane on Titan. Over the course of six years, Cassini discovered four more satellites and proved the presence of water in geysers on the satellite of Enceladus. Thanks to these studies, astronomers have obtained thousands of good images of the Saturn system.

The next mission to Saturn is likely to be the study of Titan. It will be a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency. It is expected that this will be the study of the interior of the largest moons of Saturn. The launch date of the expedition is still unknown.

Pluto

This planet was studied by only one spacecraft - "New Horizons". In this case, the purpose of the mission is far from only photographing Pluto.

Pluto and Charon Composite photo of two frames

Asteroids and comets

At first, they flew up to the nuclei of comets. We saw them, understood a lot.

In 2005, the American Deep Impact spacecraft flew up, dropped the striker on the comet Tempel 1, which photographed the surface as it approached. An explosion was made (thermal - from its own kinetic energy) and the main apparatus flew through the ejected substance, performing chemical analysis.

For the first time, the Japanese received a sample of asteroid matter (asteroid Itokawa).

Hayabusa-2 probe. It included a robot to study the asteroid, but it flew past due to inaccurate calculations and the low gravity of the asteroid itself. The main apparatus can be said to be a vacuum cleaner, without sitting down, it took soil.

Rosetta. The first object that entered the orbit of a comet (Churumova-Gerasimenko). The spacecraft included a small lander. On each of its three paws was a "screw" that was supposed to screw into the surface, securing the apparatus.

Before that, at the moment of touching, two harpoon guns had to be triggered to secure the apparatus, then the cables had to pull the apparatus to the surface and after that it would have been fixed with its paws. Unfortunately, the powder charges of the harpoons did not work because of the 10-year flight. Gunpowder lost its properties under the influence of radiation. The device hit, flew off a kilometer, descended for another hour and a half, then bounced a few more times until it rolled into a crack under a rock.

The orbiter eventually photographed the descent, which lies on its side, sandwiched by a rock. On September 30, 2016, the mother device stopped working at the moment of touching. The decision was made in view of the fact that the comet, and hence the apparatus, were moving away from the Sun and there was no longer enough energy. The touch speed was only 1 m / s.

Outside the solar system

The cheapest way to leave the solar system is to accelerate due to the gravity of the planets, approaching them, using them as tugs and gradually increasing speed around each. This requires a certain configuration of the planets - in a spiral - so that, parting with the next planet, fly to the next. Due to the slowness of the most distant Uranus and Neptune, such a configuration rarely occurs, about once every 170 years. The last time Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed a spiral was in the 1970s. American scientists took advantage of this construction and sent spacecraft beyond the solar system: Pioneer 10 (Pioneer 10, launched on March 3, 1972), Pioneer 11 (Pioneer 11, launched on April 6, 1973), Voyager 2 (Voyager 2, launched on August 20, 1977) and Voyager 1 (Voyager 1, launched on September 5, 1977).

By the beginning of 2015, all four spacecraft had moved away from the Sun to the border of the Solar System. "Pioneer-10" has a speed of 12 km / s relative to the Sun and is located today at a distance of about 115 AU. e., which is approximately 18 billion km. "Pioneer-11" - at a speed of 11.4 km / s at a distance of 95 AU, or 14.8 billion km. Voyager 1 - at a speed of about 17 km / s at a distance of 132.3 AU, or 21.5 billion km (this is the most distant human-made object from the Earth and the Sun). Voyager 2 - at a speed of 15 km / s at a distance of 109 AU. e. or 18 billion km.

However, these spacecraft are still very far from the stars: the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 2,000 times farther than the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Moreover, all devices that have not been launched specifically to specific stars (and only a joint project of Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner is planned as an investor called Breakthrough Starshot) will hardly ever fly close to the stars. Of course, by cosmic standards, one can consider the "approach": the flight of "Pioneer-10" in 2 million years at a distance of several light years from the star Aldebaran, "Voyager-1" - in 40 thousand years at a distance of two light years from the star AC + 79 3888 in the constellation Giraffe and Voyager 2 - 40 thousand years later, at a distance of two light years from the star Ross 248.

Shown below are all artificial vehicles launched into space.

All spacecraft launched to date

Humanity has advanced very far in the study of the universe in general and its own solar system in particular. This is the era of private campaigns like Space X adopting the latest technology and bringing it into everyday use. Yes, so far not everything is smooth, but the first launches into outer space were unsuccessful. We need to develop new life support systems, materials for protection from such an unfriendly, but still attractive space, and most importantly, to master new speeds or even principles of movement in space. Many amazing discoveries await us - the main thing is not to stop, moving in a single impulse, like a species.