Russia heads for Mars

Russia heads for Mars: a detailed look at the Phobos/Grunt sample return mission, set to launch on November 8.

I really wish the Russians good luck with this project. Not only would it herald their return to planetary science since the fall of the Soviet Union, success here would break their long string of failures to the red planet. Though their unmanned planetary program had some remarkable achievements during the Soviet era, of the 19 missions they flew to Mars in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, all were failures, producing almost no useful data.