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Mission record

Sputnik 24

Also known as Korabl 13, Mars 1962B, Beta Xi 1, Sputnik 31 (USNSC), Sputnik24, 2MV-3 No.1

U.S.S.R · Launched

Explore trajectory

Failed · Failure

An attempted Soviet Mars lander mission. The SL-6/A-2-e launcher put the spacecraft and the attached booster upper stage into a 197 x 590 km Earth orbit with an inclination of 64.7 degrees; the complex broke up during the burn to transfer to Mars trajectory and five large pieces were tracked by the U.S. Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. The geocentric orbit of the presumed booster decayed on 25 December 1962 and the Mars spacecraft orbit decayed and it re-entered Earth's atmosphere on 19 January 1963.

Destinations
Launch vehicle
Modified SS-6 (Sapwood) with 2nd Generation Upper Stage + Escape Stage
Launch site
Tyuratam (Baikonur Cosmodrome), U.S.S.R
Countries
Soviet Union
Mission types
Lander

Chronology

Mission timeline

  1. Launch

    Launched into Earth orbit, where the vehicle broke up

    NSSDCA's launch/orbital information page gives the launch date and time as 1962-11-04T15:35:15Z and an Earth orbit with a periapsis of 197.00 km, an apoapsis of 590.00 km, a period of 92.40 minutes and an inclination of 64.700°. The master catalog records that the SL-6/A-2-e launcher put the spacecraft and the attached booster upper stage into a 197 x 590 km Earth orbit with an inclination of 64.7 degrees, that the total mass of the booster/spacecraft complex was roughly 6500 kg with the Mars spacecraft component comprising about 890 kg of this, and that the complex broke up during the burn to transfer to Mars trajectory, with five large pieces tracked by the U.S. Ballistic Missile Early Warning System.

    Earth

  2. Mission end

    Cataloged object reentry; payload identity disputed

    The geocentric orbit of the presumed booster decayed on 25 December 1962 and the Mars spacecraft orbit decayed and it re-entered Earth's atmosphere on 19 January 1963. NSSDCA's launch/orbital information page ends the Earth-orbit epoch on the same date, at 1963-01-19 00:00:00. That page also prints Decay Date: 1962-11-05, and the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved: 1962-11-05 agrees with neither the epoch stop lower on the same page, nor the master catalog's re-entry on 19 January 1963, nor the presumed booster's decay on 25 December 1962. The record follows the two dates the master catalog publishes. NASA's later chronology explicitly assigns the spacecraft reentry to November5. The January 19event is retained as the cataloged-object account, with the payload/fragment identity unresolved; it is not a precise physical endpoint for the carried descent module.

    Earth

Mission architecture

Vehicles

  • Sputnik 24 · Spacecraft

    Destinations: Mars

    • Spuskaemiy apparat · Lander

Trajectory record

Trajectory dataset not yet available

Known dates and encounters do not uniquely determine a flight path. This mission’s sourced timeline is available above; no verified trajectory is currently published here.

What is needed to reconstruct this path?
  • A frame-qualified position and vector velocity at an epoch, or equivalent complete orbital elements.
  • Separate state histories and release epochs for the listed vehicles; a parent mission trajectory cannot be assigned to every component.
  • Finer event-time constraints where required by an orbital reconstruction; the stored day/month/year precision is retained.
  • The actual failed-flight state history. Intended destinations are not evidence that the spacecraft reached them.

Provenance

Sources

Each source is listed once and labeled with the mission, event, trajectory, or destination/body context it supports.

Data verified through September 14, 2026