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

[IM4]

In fact after global redesigning in 2003 some of Fobos-Grunt payload (50-100 kg) had been allocated for additional scientific instruments, presumably of foreign origin (european first of all). That’s the opportunity we offer to Chinese and some agreement had been finally reached. The kind of payload is still to be determined. It can be some instrument or even small exploration probe like japanese “Minerva”, which failed to land on Itokawa. The main question is whether Chinese manage to meet deadline of 2009 year launch.

By now launch date remains steady and funding increases progressively every year. First technological model of spacecraft was manufactured this summer and already shipped to vibrotesting. So we have all chances to make Fobos-Grunt a reality.

Of course this is a very ambitious mission, even more complex and difficult than Hayabusa. Fobos-Grunt will perform actual landing, not hovering in Haybusa’s style, that’s much more risky and greatly depend on too many circumstances which are still unknown. For example there is still exist no accurate map of Phobos. We need map with resolution of 30 cm to detect all potentially hazardous rubbles and slopes, but currently only 3-5 m resolution available. Nonetheless after preliminary investigations several landing sites were chosen. Primary site is located near 20 S, 315 W. This is equatorial region on Mars-facing side of Phobos , in its trailing hemisphere. See picture , I tried to attach. Smooth terrain without significant rubbles or grooves spans 310-360 W longitude and 40 S – 10 N latitude. Suitable place for landing and for observation - almost all the sky will be filled with Mars. After deorbit from near-Phobos trajectory landing ellipse has sizes of approximately 800x400 meters, but actually spacecraft can be autonomously guided to the chosen site within accuracy of ~10 m. Rather tricky, but paraphrasing famous sentence : “We choose to go to the Phobos till the end of decade, not ‘cause it easy, but ‘cause it hard.”

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