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]

Note regarding the Viking clustered engines: During testing of candidate engines -- maybe they already knew - that above a very few millibar pressures, a conventional bell-shaped engine nozzle's plume collapsed from a nearly hemisphereical plume to a focussed jet, as the plume detached from the nozzle. Simulated Viking landings in vaccuum chambers dug serious pits in the dirt and scattered it all over everywhere and everything. The Surveyor and Apollo LM engines would have done the same if Moon had a Mars like atmosphere.

Of course, the idiots we know who claim we never went to the moon don't know this. It's one of their stupid fallacies, that the rocket engines should have dug deep craters under the LM.