Phobos-Grunt Options

[tedstryk]

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

[edstrick]

The soviets and the Russians after them have had a severe problem with reliabilty in initial flights of series of spacecraft on lunar and planetary missions. After a series of sucesses and partial sucesses with the series-1 lunar missions (Luna 1 through 3, not including launch failures), they had sustained failures with the series-2 lunar series, Luna 4 through 8; before Luna 9 landed, 10-12 orbited and 13 landed.

The series 3 lunar missions started with the failure of a sample return mission (Luna 15, during Apollo 11), then succeeded with Luna 16, 2 Lunokhod rovers, 2 heavy lunar orbiters (who's science return seemed to be minimal) and 2 more successful sample returns (and 2 sample return missions that were reputedly damaged during landing attempts in the rough highlands south of Mare Crisium. On the whole, pretty successful.

Similarly, the one block-1 planetary launch and all the early series-2 planetary launches failed until Venera 4 in 1967, 5 & 6 in 69 probed the atmosphere, and finally Venera 7 landed and had a partially successful mission in 1971 (Venera 8 one opposition later was a complete success) All the series-2 Mars missions failed, though one that was launched as an engineering test after it missed the launch window to mars, Zond-3, did a successful lunar flyby. All the series-3 lander missions to Mars were failures, though the Mars 3 orbiter was a success, and the Mars 5 orbiter was a success that failed prematurely.

After failing to send missions to compete with Vikings at Mars in 75, the series-3 missions to Venus succeeded brilliantly. Venera 11 and 12 failed to turn on landed science after highly successful atmosphere descents, but 13 and 14 were full successes, 15 and 16 were successful radar orbiters (one had some problems), and Vega 1 and 2 venus landers and balloons were successful, and the Halley flyby missions were largely successful, though the imaging quality at the comet was fairly miserable (it did provide essential pathfinding targeting for Giotto).

The series-4 missions (2 Phobos missions and poor Mars 96, which was launched-to-death) failed, but the Phobos 2 mission was a substantial scientific success as a Mars orbiter before it failed during the Phobos orbit rendezvous operations. Then their budget failed.