On May 5, 1965, Soviet authorities officially announced that contact with the malfunctioning Zond 2 spacecraft had been lost three months before it reached Mars. Zond 2 would silently flyby Mars at a reported distance of only 1,500 kilometers on August 6, 1965 over three weeks after NASA’s Mariner 4 became the first spacecraft to flyby Mars successfully and return close up images of the Red Planet. While the Soviet announcement marked the official end of the mission, speculation about the enigmatic Zond 2 was only just beginning. At various points in time over the following three decades, there were those (including myself) who made the case that Zond 2 was suppose to to deliver a simple lander to Mars over a decade before NASA’s Viking program while others thought it was a flyby. As a result of new information about early Soviet planetary missions made available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the conventional wisdom over the last two decades has been that Zond 2 was a photographic flyby mission in competition with Mariner 4. But even this explanation failed to answer all the questions about Zond 2.
In an article published in The Space Review, titled “The Mission of Zond 2”, I present the story of the true mission of Zond 2 based on recent revelations from the archives of the old Soviet Union. Contrary to much of the speculation in past decades about this mysterious flight, it turns out that Zond 2 was neither a flyby nor a lander mission but had a different objective instead. A more technically detailed discussion of the Zond 2 mission with a trajectory analysis can be found in an earlier post on Drew Ex Machina, “Zond 2: Old Mysteries Solved & New Questions Raised”
“The Mission of Zond 2″, The Space Review, Article #2745, May 4, 2015 [Article]
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Related Reading
“Zond 2: Old Mysteries Solved & New Questions Raised”, Drew Ex Machina, July 17, 2014 [Post]
“The Mystery of Zond 2”, Electronic Journal of the Astronomical Society of the Atlantic, Volume 2, Number 9, April 1991 [Issue]
“If At First You Don’t Succeed… Part I”, The Space Review, Article #2477, March 24, 2014 [Article]
“If At First You Don’t Succeed… Part II”, The Space Review, Article #2480, March 31, 2014 [Article]
“…Try, Try Again”, The Space Review, Article #2501, April 28, 2014 [Article]