An update on the efforts to save Phobos-Grunt

An update on the efforts to save Phobos-Grunt.

“The first pass was successful in that the spacecraft’s radio downlink was commanded to switch on and telemetry was received,” said Wolfgang Hell, ESA’s Service Manager for Phobos–Grunt. Telemetry typically includes information on the status and health of a spacecraft’s systems. “The signals received from Phobos–Grunt were much stronger than those initially received on 22 November, in part due to having better knowledge of the spacecraft’s orbital position.”

The second pass was short, and so was used only to uplink commands – no receipt of signal was expected. However, the following three passes in the early morning of 24 November proved to be more difficult: no signal was received from Phobos–Grunt.

Russian space agency head says there is still a chance to save Phobos-Grunt

The head of the Russian space agency said yesterday that there is still a chance to save Phobos-Grunt.

“The probe is going to be in orbit until January, but in the first days of December the window will close” to re-programme it, he told Russian news agencies at Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

He also said that the probe will not pose a threat, and will burn up in the atmosphere if it should fall to Earth.

Toxic Russian Mars probe aims for Earth

It now looks like the stranded and toxic Russian Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt, is likely aimed at Earth.

We are looking at an uncontrolled toxic reentry scenario. Phobos-Grunt . . . is fully-laden with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide; that’s ten tons of fuel and oxidizer. The probe itself weighs-in at only three tons. . . . Phobos-Grunt’s batteries are draining and its orbit is degrading. It looks as if the probe will reenter later this month/early December. NORAD is putting a Nov. 26 reentry date on Phobos-Grunt.

It looks bad for Phobos-Grunt

It looks bad for Phobos-Grunt.

“Overnight, several attempts were made to obtain telemetric information from the probe. They all ended with zero result,” Interfax quoted a source in the Russian space sector as saying. “The probability of saving the probe is very, very small,” added the source, who was not identified.

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.

Sailing to Mars

With the end of the Mar500 simulated mission this coming Friday, the Russians are now proposing an eighteen month simulated Mars mission on board the International Space Station.

The Russians have been pushing to do this on ISS for years. Unfortunately, NASA has always resisted.

Yet, as I wrote in Leaving Earth, we will never be able to send humans to any other planets until we have flown at least one simulated mission, in zero gravity in Earth orbit, beforehand. Wernher von Braun pointed out this reality out back in the 1950s, and that reality has not changed in the ensuing half century. Not only will such a mission tell us a great deal about the medical issues of living in weightlessness for years at a time — issues that are far from trivial — it will give us the opportunity to find out the engineering problems of building a vessel capable of keeping humans alive during interplanetary flight, far from Earth.
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