WI: Soviets Launch Yupiter Program

What if in the 70's and 80's the USSR launched probes to Jupiter? (Yupiter is Jupiter in transliterated Russian) How would the probes look like? How many of the probes would be successful? (Would it be the triumph like Venera or the string of failures like Mars?) How many probes would be sent? What scientific discoveries would we have uncovered earlier? (They would've been sent before Galileo)

I think the probes would look like the Mars orbiters with RTGs instead of solar panels, by the way.
 
What if in the 70's and 80's the USSR launched probes to Jupiter? (Yupiter is Jupiter in transliterated Russian) How would the probes look like? How many of the probes would be successful? (Would it be the triumph like Venera or the string of failures like Mars?) How many probes would be sent? What scientific discoveries would we have uncovered earlier? (They would've been sent before Galileo)

I think the probes would look like the Mars orbiters with RTGs instead of solar panels, by the way.

Really depends on how many instruments the probe can carry. Also, the USSR has worse tech than the US on satellites and probes(Viking 1, Mars orbiter and lander, was 1455kg in total; Venera 9, Venus orbiter and lander, was 4936kg in total). And you would probably know this yourself. Without much difference in Soviet space program and tech development, I can see a wee small probe launched towards Jupiter and instead ending up orbiting Uranus or something.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Really depends on how many instruments the probe can carry. Also, the USSR has worse tech than the US on satellites and probes(Viking 1, Mars orbiter and lander, was 1455kg in total; Venera 9, Venus orbiter and lander, was 4936kg in total). And you would probably know this yourself. Without much difference in Soviet space program and tech development, I can see a wee small probe launched towards Jupiter and instead ending up orbiting Uranus or something.
Wasn't a lot of the weight of Venera 9 attempting to, well, endure Venus? Venus is absolutely atrocious to have anything coherently organized, what with ridiculous air pressure, insane temperature, howling winds, and all the sulphuric acid.
Heck, one of the Soviet Venera probe designs actually melted during environment testing when they replicated the environment of Venus. The Viking landers never had to deal with that.
 
Really depends on how many instruments the probe can carry. Also, the USSR has worse tech than the US on satellites and probes(Viking 1, Mars orbiter and lander, was 1455kg in total; Venera 9, Venus orbiter and lander, was 4936kg in total). And you would probably know this yourself. Without much difference in Soviet space program and tech development, I can see a wee small probe launched towards Jupiter and instead ending up orbiting Uranus or something.
So you mean it would essentially be impossible for the Soviets to launch a probe to Jupiter? Even if they made the smallest probe they could make, just comm systems, trajectory corrections propulsion system, and a few instruments and they launched it on a Proton?

EDIT: But, how much did the Mars landers and orbiters weigh? As Saphroneth pointed out, Venera 9 was built to withstand literal hell.
 
So you mean it would essentially be impossible for the Soviets to launch a probe to Jupiter? Even if they made the smallest probe they could make, just comm systems, trajectory corrections propulsion system, and a few instruments and they launched it on a Proton?

as I said,

I can see a wee small probe launched towards Jupiter and instead ending up orbiting Uranus or something.

I didn't mean it would be impossible. It would work, and can work. It just works in a different direction.
 
Ah, okay, sorry. But also, could a Proton-K launch a Mars orbiter weighted craft on a Jupiter trajectory? (Well, it'd weigh less then a Mars orbiter, because you don't need all that fuel for orbital insertion)
 
Soviet probes showed chronic issues with three major things:
1) Propulsion over extended durations
2) Radiation protection
3) Computer program stability and testing

Sadly, all the three are critical to outer planets missions in general, and to any orbiter missions in particular (particularly Jupiter, with its nasty radiation fields). I'd give poor odds for mission success, especially since the Soviets tended to see success when they were able to try something over and over until they got it right, which a limited number of Jovian probes doesn't really allow.

The natural progression would probably be as with the Americans--initial flyby-only missions like Pioneer or Voyager, followed later by orbiters if those are successful. A question is when they start launching--after 1973, the Soviets cut back to focusing their efforts on Venus, where they were experiencing successes, and left Mars and anything beyond to the Americans. I'm not sure a couple abortive flyby probes failing to leave LEO or glitching out mid-coast and never entering orbit of Jupiter would convince them to spend more money there, too.

Also, when it comes to anything more than a flyby, there's another problem. Proton's hypergolic or kerolox stages show increasingly poor performance as the required delta-v increases, and that really bites with the high C3 required for Jupiter-bound trajectories, which is something like 85 km^2/s^2 IIRC. Using Silverbird, I work out that Proton maxes out at about 1.3 tons to that orbit, so an adaption of the 3+ ton Mars bus is right out. Knocking even more off that mass as fuel for an orbital entry means an orbiter somewhere under a ton, which is a very small probe.
 
It's conceivable that it could be done. The Russians had some difficulty with high-energy upper stages (they didn't really experiment with cryogenics for many years after the Americans), but I imagine Proton or its immediate predecessor could send a decent orbiter to Jupiter. The crude nature of Russian electronics might even be a measure of redundancy in the high-radiation environment.

The key would be to get there before Pioneer 10--in fact, the propaganda value would be best if the probe could fly by or orbit Jupiter in 1970, shortly after Apollo. The Soviets could spin it as an example of the triumph of Soviet science over American stunts. The propaganda value shrinks greatly after Pioneer 10.

EDIT: e of pi gives a good technical analysis. It seems you really would want a Soviet hydrolox stage, or else the mission isn't really going to be doable until the 1980s, when Soviet experience with automated rendezvous might make a dual-launch dual-upper-stage mission feasible. And a Soviet space program with access to hydrogen-oxygen technology around 1970 would drastically alter a lot of their space history--IOTL, they were divided over whether liquid oxygen was a suitable propellant, let alone the hard cryogens.
 
Soviet probes showed chronic issues with three major things:
1) Propulsion over extended durations
2) Radiation protection
3) Computer program stability and testing

Sadly, all the three are critical to outer planets missions in general, and to any orbiter missions in particular (particularly Jupiter, with its nasty radiation fields). I'd give poor odds for mission success, especially since the Soviets tended to see success when they were able to try something over and over until they got it right, which a limited number of Jovian probes doesn't really allow.

The natural progression would probably be as with the Americans--initial flyby-only missions like Pioneer or Voyager, followed later by orbiters if those are successful. A question is when they start launching--after 1973, the Soviets cut back to focusing their efforts on Venus, where they were experiencing successes, and left Mars and anything beyond to the Americans. I'm not sure a couple abortive flyby probes failing to leave LEO or glitching out mid-coast and never entering orbit of Jupiter would convince them to spend more money there, too.

Also, when it comes to anything more than a flyby, there's another problem. Proton's hypergolic or kerolox stages show increasingly poor performance as the required delta-v increases, and that really bites with the high C3 required for Jupiter-bound trajectories, which is something like 85 km^2/s^2 IIRC. Using Silverbird, I work out that Proton maxes out at about 1.3 tons to that orbit, so an adaption of the 3+ ton Mars bus is right out. Knocking even more off that mass as fuel for an orbital entry means an orbiter somewhere under a ton, which is a very small probe.
Well, when I said "Orbiter" I mean that it would use the same base as the Mars orbiter spacecraft (Like Mars 1, which was like Mars 2 and 3 except with no lander), but would just flyby Jupiter.
 
It's conceivable that it could be done. The Russians had some difficulty with high-energy upper stages (they didn't really experiment with cryogenics for many years after the Americans), but I imagine Proton or its immediate predecessor could send a decent orbiter to Jupiter. The crude nature of Russian electronics might even be a measure of redundancy in the high-radiation environment.

The key would be to get there before Pioneer 10--in fact, the propaganda value would be best if the probe could fly by or orbit Jupiter in 1970, shortly after Apollo. The Soviets could spin it as an example of the triumph of Soviet science over American stunts. The propaganda value shrinks greatly after Pioneer 10.
Hmm... But I think the Soviets would be to bogged down with trying to get the N1 to fly to try to launch a "Yupiter-1" Jupiter flyby probe. Feel free to correct me on that.

EDIT: Did the Soviets have RTGs in the 70's?
 
Hmm... But I think the Soviets would be to bogged down with trying to get the N1 to fly to try to launch a "Yupiter-1" Jupiter flyby probe. Feel free to correct me on that.
That's my guess. Between Venera, N1/the moon, and what little they were managing to accomplish shipping aluminum by the ton to Mars (about all their Mars program was good for was raw materials delivery ;) , their bandwidth was pretty much absorbed. It also didn't help that, like with the Americans, many of their mid-to-late-70s plans for Mars landers (and if they'd had any outer planets ambitions, likely those as well) were planned as N1 launches.

(As to the RTG question...yes, they did have RTGs. in the period, including these space-based ones. These were apparently more powerful and heavy than you could really afford on such a tight mass budget, but they also did smaller ones for lighthouse beacons. Assuming some kind of dedicated program gets serious funding, it's doable to use an RTG.)
 
According some webpage
The soviet had ideas for Grand Tour mission similar like Voyager probe fly-by.

Also Sun probe Tsiolkovsky that use Jupiter (in english) as sling shot
but like e pf pi say, the Soviet had hell of problems with there space hardware and russian have still them (Phobos-Grunt)
 
but like e pf pi say, the Soviet had hell of problems with there space hardware and russian have still them (Phobos-Grunt)
Phobos-Grunt depressed me. I was really excited about it (Phobos is one of my favorite moons because it's rather strange), and...poor quality control and bad electronics. The same old story, I suppose.
 
Hmm... Yeah, they we're sure bogged down in the hell that was the N1 development.

Also, if they did somehow manage to launch "Yupiter-1" would they have tried putting a Jupiter atmospheric probe, like they put on Galileo?

EDIT: e of pi, I feel your pain too.
 
Also, if they did somehow manage to launch "Yupiter-1" would they have tried putting a Jupiter atmospheric probe, like they put on Galileo?
Almost certainly not on a Yupiter-1, no more than Pioneer 10 carried one. First, it's a lot of mass (Galileo's probe was 400 kg--that'd be nearly a third of the mass allowed for the entire spacecraft!), and second we didn't really have a close-up look at Jupiter to plan such a probe--note that the first Venus and Mars attempts waited for information back from flyby spacecraft to get back first.
 
Oh, derp. Should've known that. Also, was there any chance that they could've launched this "Yupiter program" in the 80's?
 
Oh, derp. Should've known that. Also, was there any chance that they could've launched this "Yupiter program" in the 80's?

I doubt it. They were really changing course in the 1980s--Mir, Energia, and Buran were to be the way forward, and a great deal of their resources were devoted to getting those functioning. It's conceivable that they'd begin planning it for a 1990s launch on an Energia variant at that time, but then Russia's great social experiment with anarchism would put an end to that.

EDIT: And we again run into a propaganda value problem. It would be after Voyager, so "Yupiter" would have to deliver something more impressive than Voyager did. So Yupiter would basically need to be Galileo. Which will be a stretch for a country with no experience in the outer solar system.
 
Oh... so not in the 80's, but how about sometime between 1971-1977, where the space race was over, there was just Salyut, and Voyager had not been launched.
 
Oh... so not in the 80's, but how about sometime between 1971-1977, where the space race was over, there was just Salyut, and Voyager had not been launched.
They'd have to have done a flyby first as a sort of "rangefinding," much like Pioneer 10/11, and this is a period where the Soviet program was very cash-strapped--note that after 1973, they basically abondonned their Mars program even though it's quite possible that it was about to turn a corner into success (they were using similar busses to the Venera series, and that program had finally sorted out its own bugs, so Mars might then have followed). If they were shuttering Mars, I realy think a whole new bus for "Yupiter" flybys and then an orbiter in the mid-to-late 70s is...unlikely.
 
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