[meteorite-list] Russia to Restart Planetary Exploration with Mars Probe (Phobos-Grunt)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 08:19:14 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <201111081619.pA8GJEj3029613_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1111/07phobosgrunt/

Russia to restart planetary exploration with Mars probe
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
November 7, 2011

Russia will launch a probe to a moon of Mars on Tuesday, resuming the
country's exploration of the solar system after funding woes and mission
failures hindered progress over the last two decades.
 
The ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission, first conceived in the 1990s, will
attempt to enter orbit around Mars, land on the Red Planet's
potato-shaped moon Phobos, collect samples and return to Earth.

Grunt means soil in Russian.

Russia has tried to land on Phobos before, but two probes launched in
1988 failed before they reached their goal. The failure, coupled with
another embarrassing Mars mission malfunction in 1996, spelled the
decline of the Russian planetary exploration program until now.

Liftoff is scheduled for 2016:03 GMT (3:16:03 p.m. EST) Tuesday aboard a
Zenit 2FG rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. After a
nine-minute ascent into Earth orbit powered by the two-stage Zenit
booster, the payload's main propulsion unit will fire twice to aim
toward Mars.

The spacecraft's rocket system is based on the Fregat upper stage, a
restartable hydrazine-fueled device often used to place satellites into
high-altitude orbits around Earth.

Phobos-Grunt should be on course to Mars following the propulsion unit's
second firing at 0120 GMT Wednesday (8:20 p.m. EST Tuesday), according
to Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

Loaded with propellant, a Chinese orbiter and scientific experiments,
the intricate spacecraft weighs in at 29,000 pounds.

It reach Mars in October 2012 and fire its rocket pack once more to
slide into orbit around the Red Planet. Then the craft will jettison the
propulsion unit and deploy China's Yinghuo 1 orbiter, which rides
piggyback on Phobos-Grunt for the journey there.
 
By early 2013, Phobos-Grunt will approach Phobos and study the moon with
remote sensing instruments, giving Russian scientists data needed to
select a landing site.

Using a laser altimeter and radar navigation sensor, Phobos-Grunt is
expected to descend to the surface of the moon in February 2013. Because
of the weak gravity field at Phobos, the probe must make a gentle
landing with little margin for error.

After scooping up rock with a robot arm and placing the samples in a
canister, Phobos-Grunt's return capsule will depart the moon and target
a landing back on Earth in August 2014 with nearly a half-pound of soil.

After sending its samples back to Earth, Phobos-Grunt's core spacecraft
will remain on Phobos for a continued science mission for up to a year.

"Any one of these critical stages goes wrong, and the whole mission is
compromised," said Francis Rocard, the manager of solar system
exploration at CNES, the French space agency.

In addition to its partnership with China, Russia is also receiving help
from Ukraine, France and other European countries.

Phobos-Grunt also carries a payload from the Planetary Society, the U.S.
space advocacy group. The Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, or
LIFE, will demonstrate whether microorganisms can survive long-term
space journeys, testing an important part of the transpermia hypothesis,
which states that life can travel between planets inside rocks.

Russia hopes to pull off the Phobos-Grunt project for $163 million, a
bargain in today's world of multi-billion dollar space missions. NASA's
blueprint for bringing back samples from the surface of Mars could cost
up to $10 billion, according to some estimates.
 
But Phobos is easier to reach than the Martian surface, and scientists
believe the moon's rocky exterior could harbor material blasted away
from the Red Planet by violent asteroid or comet impacts.

Soil from Phobos could tell scientists not only about Mars, but also how
the planet's two asteroid-like moons formed. Scientists say Phobos and
Deimos, the smaller of the two, could be asteroids captured by Martian
gravity or could have been ejected from Mars by an impact long ago.

The oddball Phobos is scarred by craters and fractures and measures 16
miles across on its longest axis.

Phobos-Grunt mission will mark Russia's return to interplanetary
exploration after a 15-year hiatus following the failure of another Mars
launch in 1996. That mission, named Mars 96, fell back to Earth after a
launch failure in November 1996.

The former Soviet Union achieved a series of milestones in
interplanetary exploration, including the first successful landing of a
robotic probe on another planet with a mission to Venus in 1970. The
Soviet space program also returned samples from the moon with a series
of unmanned missions.
Received on Tue 08 Nov 2011 11:19:14 AM PST