Regarding the idea of deep dust on Phobos, I dont think we need worry too much. Prior to any lunar landings, the same was said about the Moon, yet Luna 9 dispelled that idea. Similarly, touchdowns by NEAR at Eros and by Hayabusa MUSES-C at Itokawa have demonstrated that asteroids have solid surfaces.

Sinking into dust will not be a problem.

There don't seem to be any publicly available figures for the likely mass of the lander, but let's be generous and call it 1000kg. The recent mockup suggests three splayed landing pads of around 40cm diameter.

The surface gravity of Phobos peaks at 0.0084 m/s^2.

Taken together that's a Phobos ground pressure of around 22N/m^2 (say 0.003 psi, in old units). About a thousandth of a human's ground pressure standing on the Earth.

Andy

I wonder if anyone has come across this Phobos-Grunt video on YouTube:

Phobos-Grunt YouTube Video

It gives a detailed timeline of events in Russian as well as details on how the orbit insertion and extraction of samples are going to be peformed.

wait... is it going to land on Earth like Genesis - no parachutes, just crash landing?

The technique of Earth landing the Martian sample is the simplest of all. The capsule must have a stronger material than the Genesis ones.

The difference is that Genesis wasn't designed to land the way it did. However, I can imagine that some people will be very afraid of the possibility that the container breaks and the Martian bugs get out and kill all of us

This frightens me, I don't know why. It's a relativly untested method that has'nt seemed to work very well in the past.

Yeah...lithobraking augmented by a bit of atmospheric deceleration! I'm very surprised that there isn't at least a drogue (maybe a ribbon chute?) for vertical stabilization during the terminal landing phase; that reentry vehicle looks less than aerodynamically stable, unless it's really bottom-heavy.

No chute is the simplest possible design. You build it like a tank, and then you don't have to depend on any chute, drogue, mortar, circuitry, deployment, accelerometres, software etc etc etc.

I'm all for it.

Doug

Wasn't there the idea to one day convert the Mars Moons into a kind of space-station, something similar to the idea of Asteroid mining. Living inside on of these asteroids would provide astronauts with radiation shielding and the iron/carbonaceous materials could be extracted for building other items. In the far future it could possibly be converted into a station for fueling other spacecraft.

Spoken just like a man who, let's say, is trying to design an EDL system for a balloon payload...

Chen Changya of the Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering recently gave an update on the progress of Yinguo 1 at a forum on aerospace technology.



China Daily



China.org.cn

Good news everyone!
Presentations from recent IKI international forum are now available: Forum Materials.
Presentations feature Phobos-Grunt science program, METNET mission plans, latest SPICAV/SOIR/VIRTIS results, Venus exploration perspectives from ESA/ROSCOSMOS, some Rosetta and mars rovers related stuff plus a bit of planetology.

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/phobos_grunt_preflight.html - an article by Anatoly Zak:

1. Phobos-Grunt too big to launch with Soyuz-2, the launcher probably will be a Zenit rocket.

2. The project remains on track for launch in 2009

Finnish Mars Lander??!!

EDIT: Ah, the MetNet demonstrator - forgot about that