Here's Looking At You, Kid, MGS Sees Mars Odyssey and Mars Express Options

[lyford]

Sweet!

http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/05/19/index.html

[edstrick]

The Soviet planetary series consisted of poorly documented very early missions, the only ones we have real info and pics of are the Venera 1 flyby <no midcourse capability>

A second series started with Mars 1 and Zond 1 to Mars and Venus, also including Zond 3, a mars mission that missed the launch window and was sent past the moon on an engineering test mission and photo'd the back side that Luna 3 missed. None of the "block 2" mars missions made it, but the venera missions finally suceeded with progressively deeper atmosphere probes till Venera 8 was a full success. None of the veneus flyby missions worked, though. The history of the missions is complicated, with the series being transferred from one technical group to another. (Sort of as if Ranger had been taken from JPL and turned over to Goddard after the Ranger 6 failure)

The "block 3" vehicles were the 1970's through mid 80's Mars and Venera and Venus/Halley missions. Lots of failures at first, then they worked the bugs out of the basic design, together with generally rising reliability. They ended the series when the could no longer get parts which had become obsolete <in part>

The Phobos mission was a "block 4", more or less, and had new project teething problems... then the budget fell apart.