Phobos-Grunt |
Phobos-Grunt |
Jan 22 2005, 02:15 PM
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#1
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4404 Joined: 17-February 04 From: Powell, TN Member No.: 33 |
In Astronomy's February issue, they report that Russia has approved funding for the Phobos-Grunt mission. Design work has gone on since 1997, and the new design is scaled down to fly an a Soyuz rocket instead of the larger Proton. The main purpose is similar to Phobos-2, with the addition of a sample return. Also being discussed is the possibility of it carrying a few "meteorological stations" fof Mars itself. Generally, I have written this mission off as "never going to happen," but with the new Russian alliance with ESA, I wonder if they might be able to actually fly this thing. Also, with Putin's increasingly Soviet-style leadership, and with the likelyhood of lunar missions from China and India, Russian pride might drive this mission. If so, I have a concern. This mission sounds really, really ambitious. And the Russians have never even sent a fully successful Mars orbiter, and that is when they launched them in pairs or triplets. Still, if the mission flies, even if it doesn't bring back Phobos soil it might obtain some interesting results. Here is ESA's Phobos-Grunt page:
http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESA_Permanent_...IJFW4QWD_0.html Also, ESA has another page on potential Russian programs, although this seem to be nothing but pipe dreams at the moment. Would be a cool mission though. http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESA_Permanent_...0LFW4QWD_0.html And also a page on the only partially realized current Russian project, its program to put instruments on other's spacecraft, such as HEND on Odyssey. http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESA_Permanent_...HMFW4QWD_0.html -------------------- |
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Aug 8 2009, 10:09 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1729 Joined: 3-August 06 From: 43° 35' 53" N 1° 26' 35" E Member No.: 1004 |
I have just received from a contact in China an interesting presentation about YH-1. Unfortunately he has asked me not to redistribute it...
just to summarize quickly: - the 800x80000 km orbit will be quite suitable for exploring almost all areas of interaction between the solar wind and the planet including the ionospheric bow shock, magnetosheath, the pileup region and the tail and plasma sheet. Only the lower ionosphere will be out of reach, but it could still be sounded by mutual radiooccultations between Yinghuo and Fobos Grunt. - five-instrument payload, including a plasma package, consisting of an electron analyzer and an ion analyzer and mass spectrometer, a radiooccultation sounder, a magnetometer and a camera with 200 m resolution at best to take pictures of Mars - use of ESA and Russian deep space antennae - 950 mm antenna, 12 W transmitter in two frequencies (8.4 and 7.17 GHz), data rate between 8 bps and 16 kbps - use of VLBI for localization - 8.8 hour eclipses in November 2010 (apoapsis within Mars' shadow cone) - launch window for FG and YH-1 nominally running from 6 to 16 October |
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