Future Mercury Missions Options

[Paolo]

apparently Russia has started thinking about a Mercury landing mission beyond preliminary feasibility studies.
http://www.federalspace.ru/main.php?id=2&nid=10857
Such a mission would nicely fill a niche left empty by other space agencies, but from the similar US Decadal survey study, it is not going to be a cheap one!

[Paolo]

for some strange reasons when I click on the link now all I get is the Russian page...
anyway, this was the press release:

Space agencies of Russia and US, Roscosmos and NASA, discuss space missions to distant space, Roscosmos Head Anatoly Perminov stated at the Summit of the space agency heads held under the aegis of International Academy of Astronautics in Washington.
Perminov and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who both lead Space Cooperation Working Group in the framework of the Russian-US President Commission, met in Washington to hold the third meeting of the Working Group.
According to Roscosmos Head, Russian proposals concerning future cooperation “had been submitted to NASA”. The list includes different options, including missions to LLO and asteroids.
The agenda also covered future cooperation in the Russia-initiated Mercury landing program and development of a nuclear propulsion system.
Nuclear propulsion systems are considered for large-scale human missions, not for small spacecraft which could use other type of propulsion – ionic engines or solar wind energy. The system is unique, as no other propulsion in the world is made on the basis of similar principles.

there is also another release in Russian that I found translated here:

Roscosmos Head Perminov mentioned that Russia planned to carry out a set of new important solar system exploration initiatives.

“Currently, Phobos-Grunt project is begin developed. Russian scientists used to take part only in international missions, and we appreciate our partners for providing the opportunities which brought a lot of good scientific results.

Our Lunar program was seriously pushed by the data obtained recently. Luna-Glob and Luna-Resource design continues. Russian scientists and engineers also have future plans to deliver lunar soil to the Earth and to build a lunar outpost”.

According to him, Russian project Mercury-II which intends landing on the Mercury will provide significant auxiliary data for the missions of NASA (Messenger) and ESA-JAXA (Bepi-Colombo).

The other project, Laplas-Europe-II, covers a landing mission to Jupiter’s icy satellite Europe. The dates of the mission are close to the dates of NASA’s and ESA’s similar projects.

Perminov emphasized that “asteroid and comet hazard awareness project is also a very important aspect for global international space cooperation”.

He said that preliminary analysis of the mission to Apophis asteroid had been done. “This is interesting from different points of view, including flight tests of prospective spacecraft.”

[Hungry4info]

for some strange reasons when I click on the link now all I get is the Russian page...

Same here. I found clicking on the "English" link in the upper-right translated it, however without returning me to the relevant page. After closing the tab/window, re-clicking on the link you posted a couple posts back will bring you to the page in English.