Today Mars Express began a series of flybys of Phobos, the largest moon of Mars. The campaign will reach its crescendo on 3 March, when the spacecraft will set a new record for the closest pass to Phobos, skimming the surface at just 50 km. The data collected could help untangle the origin of this mysterious moon.
1 March 2010
ESA’s Mars Express will skim the surface of Mars’ largest moon Phobos on Wednesday evening. Passing by at an altitude of 67 km, precise radio tracking will allow researchers to peer inside the mysterious moon.
Mars Express is currently engaged in a series of 12 flybys of Phobos. At each close pass, different instruments are trained towards the mysterious space rock, gaining new information. The closest flyby will take place on 3 March at 21:55 CET (20:55 GMT).
From close range, Mars Express will be pulled ‘off-course’ by the gravitational field of Phobos. This will amount to no more than a few millimetres every second and will not affect the mission in any way. However, to the tracking teams on Earth, it will allow a unique look inside the moon to see how its mass is distributed throughout.
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Updates as the flybys take place will be posted on the Mars Express blog.
Code: Select all
Date Altitude (km)* Instruments used during this flyby
16 February 991 PFS, SPICAM, ASPERA
22 February 574 PFS, SPICAM, ASPERA
25 February 398 PFS, MARSIS
28 February 226 PFS, MARSIS
03 March 50 MaRS, ASPERA
07 March 107 HRSC, OMEGA, MARSIS, SPICAM, ASPERA
10 March 286 HRSC, OMEGA, MARSIS, ASPERA
13 March 476 HRSC, SPICAM, PFS, ASPERA
16 March 662 HRSC, SPICAM, PFS, ASPERA
19 March 848 HRSC, SPICAM, PFS, ASPERA
23 March 1341 Not used
26 March 1304 HRSC, SPICAM, PFS, ASPERA
* Distance from surface of PhobosCode: Select all
Instrument Scientific Objective
ASPERA Study the interaction between the solar wind and the surface of Phobos
HRSC Produce high resolution images of surface and characterise the Grunt landing site
MaRS Determine the Phobos gravity field
MARSIS Study the sub-surface seeking indications of structure and internal composition
SPICAM, PFS, OMEGA Characterise the surface
Mars Express encountered Phobos last night, smoothly skimming past at just 67 km, the closest any manmade object has ever approached Mars’ enigmatic moon. The data collected could help unlock the origin of not just Phobos but other ‘second generation’ moons.
Something is not right about Phobos. It looks like a solid object but previous flybys have shown that it is not dense enough to be solid all the way through. Instead, it must be 25-35% porous. This has led planetary scientists to believe that it is little more than a ‘rubble pile’ circling Mars. Such a rubble pile would be composed of blocks both large and small resting together, with possibly large spaces between them where they do not fit easily together.
The images show Mars’ rocky moon in exquisite detail, with a resolution of just 4.4 metres per pixel. They show the proposed landing sites for the forthcoming Phobos-Grunt mission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos-Grunt wrote:
<<Phobos-Grunt (Russian: Фобос-Грунт Fobos-Grunt; "Phobos Soil") is a planned Russian sample return mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. The Chinese Mars orbiter Yinghuo-1 will be sent together with the mission. Scheduled for launch late 2011 or early 2012, Phobos-Grunt will be the first Russian interplanetary mission since the failed Mars 96 mission. If successful, this will be the first extraterrestrial sample from a planetary body brought back to Earth since the last sample return mission by Luna 24 in 1976.
Phobos-Grunt is an unmanned lander that will study Phobos and then return a soil sample to Earth. It will also study Mars from orbit, including its atmosphere and dust storms, plasma and radiation. It is currently scheduled to be launched in 2011 on a Zenit rocket launcher with a Fregat upper stage. The return vehicle will be back on Earth in 2012. The journey to Mars will take about ten months. The spacecraft will then spend several months studying the planet and its moons from orbit, before landing on Phobos.
Immediately after the touchdown, the lander will load a soil sample into a return rocket. In case of a breakdown of communications with mission control, it can enter an emergency mode to collect samples and still send them home in the return rocket. Normal collection could last from two days to a week. The robotic arm can collect rocks up to about half an inch in diameter. It ends in a pipe-shaped tool that splits to form A CLAW. This encloses a piston that will push the soil sample into an artillery-shell-shaped container. A light-sensitive photo-diode in THE CLAW will help scientists confirm that the device did scoop material. They hope also to see images of trenches THE CLAW leaves on the surface. The manipulator should perform 15 to 20 scoops yielding a total of 3 to 5.5 ounces (85 to 160 g) of soil.http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMK17CKP6G_index_0.html wrote:
The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard the ESA spacecraft Mars Express took this image of the Phobos Grunt landing area using the HRSC nadir channel on 7 March 2010, HRSC Orbit 7915. The image resolution is 4.4m per pixel and the insert marks the proposed landing region and sites for Phobos-Grunt. Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
For operational and landing safety reasons, the proposed landing sites were selected on the far side of Phobos within the area 5°S-5°N, 230-235°E. This region was imaged by the HRSC high-resolution camera of Mars Express during the July-August 2008 flybys of Phobos. But new HRSC images showing the vicinity of the landing area under different conditions, such as better illumination from the Sun, remain highly valuable for mission planners.
The return rocket will sit atop the spacecraft, and will need to rise at 35 km/h (22 mph) to escape Phobos' gravity. To protect experiments remaining on the lander, springs will vault the rocket to a safe height, at which its engines will fire and begin maneuvers for the eventual trip to Earth. The lander's experiments will continue in-situ on Phobos' surface for a year. To conserve power, mission control will turn these on and off in a precise sequence. The robotic arm will place more samples in a chamber that will heat it and analyze its spectrum. This analysis might determine the presence of easily vaporized substances, such as water.
The Chinese Mars probe Yinghuo-1 will be sent together with Phobos-Grunt. A second Chinese payload, the Soil Off Loading and Preparation SYStem (SOLPSYS), is to be integrated into the instruments of the lander. SOPSYS is a microgravity grinding tool developed by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
- *SOLIPSISM* is the philosophical idea that one's own mind is all that exists. SOLIPSISM is an epistemological or ontological position that knowledge of anything outside one's own specific mind is unjustified. The external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist. In the history of philosophy, solipsism has served as a skeptical hypothesis.>>
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001348 wrote:
Phobos arts and crafts
The Planetary Society Blog By Emily Lakdawalla
Mar. 5, 2008 | 15:42 PST | 23:42 UTC
<<A Georgia architect named Chuck Clark has been experimenting for several years with a technique called "Constant Scale Natural Boundary Mapping," a geometric method for making a two-dimensional map of a three-dimensional object that can be cut and folded into a reasonable representation of the actual thing. He'll be presenting his Phobos and Deimos maps (PDF, 650k), and his method, in a poster at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference next week. He recently posted a new constant scale natural boundary map of Mars' moon Phobos, and I thought I'd give the assembly a try. Here's the map, which I printed onto a letter-sized piece of card stock:
>>
Phobos may be a mass of rocky rubble, not a captured asteroid
The interior of Mars’ moon Phobos could be as much as 30 percent empty space, new observations suggest. Though it’s still not clear how the object formed, the finding means it is probably not an asteroid that was captured by the Red Planet’s gravity, researchers say.
Scientists have long debated the origin of Phobos, and these new findings narrow down the possibilities, says Tom Andert, a planetary geophysicist at the University of the German Armed Forces in Munich. He and his colleagues report in the May 16 Geophysical Research Letters that Phobos almost certainly isn’t a single solid object.
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Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, is a cratered, irregularly shaped object just 27 kilometers long. Andert and his colleagues collected the best measurements ever of Phobos’ mass by looking at perturbations in the orbit of Mars Express, a Mars-orbiting spacecraft, caused by the moon’s gravitational tug.
Based on the measurements, the researchers estimate that Phobos contains about 10.7 quadrillion metric tons of material — making the lumpy moon about a billionth the mass of Earth. That, plus the improved volume estimate of the moon gleaned from radar measurements, indicates that Phobos’ overall density is about 1.87 grams per cubic centimeter, much less than the 3 g/cm3 average density of the rocks in Mars’ crust.
The density of Phobos is similar to that of some asteroids. However, Andert says, there aren’t many scenarios that would allow Mars to capture an asteroid in a circular orbit without breaking it to pieces.
It’s also unlikely Phobos is made solely of Mars crust blasted into space by an extraterrestrial impact and then reassembled by gravity, as some studies have suggested, because the spectral characteristics of the moon’s rocks don’t match those of the Red Planet.
The truth of Phobos’ origins might be a blend of those scenarios, the team suggests. Phobos may be the remnants of Martian crust blasted into space, reassembled over time by mutual gravitational attraction, and then struck by a passing asteroid that added enough material to change the moon’s spectral characteristics.
Precise mass determination and the nature of PhobosRecent flybys suggest that Mars’ larger moon Phobos could be a porous amalgamation of space rubble, with as much as 30 percent of the moon’s interior being empty space. N (upper left) marks the moon’s north pole.
Mars Express has returned images from the Phobos flyby of 9 January 2011.
Mars Express passed Mars’ largest moon at a distance of 100km.
If someone were to ask you when fear was first discovered, you could tell them August 11, 1877. That’s when, 134 years ago today, Asaph Hall identified Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons. But even though it’s named after the Greek god of fear, there’s nothing to be afraid of…
Asaph Hall III (1829 – 1907) was an astronomer working at the US Naval Observatory on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. in 1877, and was in charge of their 26-inch telescope, then the largest refractor telescope in the world. Hall spotted a “faint star near Mars” on August 17 and later identified it as a moon – another moon, actually, since Hall had already identified the smaller Deimos on August 11. That’s two moons in one week! Not too shabby for a self-taught astronomer from Goshen, Connecticut who dropped out of school at 16.
Hall was clearly no slouch. Despite leaving school early to apprentice as a carpenter, he later studied mathematics at New York’s Central College and in 1856 got a job at the Harvard College Observatory, where he became very good at computing orbits. A year after becoming assistant astronomer at the Naval Observatory in 1862 he was made professor. Hall published almost 500 papers, including studies of double stars, the mass of Mars, Mercury’s perihelion, natural satellites, Saturn’s rings, solar and stellar parallax, and the value of pi. He also identified the rotational period of Saturn and described the retrograde motion of its moon Hyperion. Hall taught celestial mechanics at Harvard until 1901.
One could say his astronomical abilities were… well, astronomical.
Above is a quick animation of Phobos made from five images taken by ESA’s Mars Express on January 9 while passing at a distance of about 62 miles (100 km). Mars Express had taken images in five HRSC channels… I combined those to create the animation. (Phobos’ north pole was cropped a bit in the original data, hence the flat-top.)
Astronomers are still unsure of where Phobos came from. Did it form with Mars as a planet? Is it a captured asteroid, now trapped in orbit? Or is Phobos a chunk of Mars flung into orbit from an impact? (Or… maybe it’s an ancient alien spacecraft?? Just kidding.) Wherever it came from, as a moon Phobos is an oddity. In addition to its small size – only 16 miles across at its widest – low reflectivity (albedo) and irregular shape, it orbits its parent planet at a rather low altitude, only 5,840 miles (as compared to our own Moon’s 248,000 mile distance) and thus needs to travel at a very high speed in order to stay in orbit. It is actually orbiting Mars overthree times faster than Mars rotates, and rises in Mars’ western sky. Its orbit is so low, in fact, that it can’t even be seen from the polar regions on Mars!
It’s estimated that Phobos’ orbit is steadily decreasing in altitude and will eventually impact Mars’ surface or be broken up by tidal forces, perhaps becoming a thin ring of debris around the planet.
What’s fascinating is that just over 134 years ago people didn’t even know Mars had a moon (nevermind two) and now we’re able to see images of it in incredible detail from close proximity… and soon even study the surface itself!
I’m sure Professor Hall would have approved.
In less than 48 hours, Russia’s bold Phobos-Grunt mechanized probe will embark on a historic flight to haul humanities first ever soil samples back from the tiny Martian moon Phobos. Liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome remains on target for November 9 (Nov 8 US EDT).
For an exquisite view of every step of this first-of-its-kind robot retriever, watch this spectacular action packed animation (below) outlining the entire 3 year round trip voyage. The simulation was produced by Roscosmos, Russia’s Federal Space Agency and the famous IKI Space Research Institute. It’s set to cool music – so don’t’ worry, you don’t need to understand Russian.
Another video below shows the arrival and uncrating of the actual Phobos-Grunt spacecraft at Baikonur in October 2011.
The highly detailed animation begins with the blastoff of the Zenit booster rocket and swiftly progresses through Earth orbit departure, Phobos-Grunt Mars orbit insertion, deployment of the piggybacked Yinghuo-1 (YH-1) mini satellite from China, Phobos-Grunt scientific reconnaissance of Phobos and search for a safe landing site, radar guided propulsive landing, robotic arm manipulation and soil sample collection and analysis, sample transfer to the Earth return capsule and departure, plummeting through Earth’s atmosphere and Russian helicopter retrieval of the precious cargo carrier.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... 0RNVwP_uz8
Video Caption: Every step of Russia’s Phobos-Grunt soil retrieval mission. Credit: Roscosmos/IKI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... 0rJdU3Anp4
Video Caption: On October 21, the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft arrived at the Baikonur Cosmodrome and was uncrated and moved to assembly building 31 for fueling, final preflight processing and encapsulation in the nose cone. Credit: Roscosmos
Labeled Schematic of Phobos-Grunt and Yinghou-1 (YH-1) orbiter. Credit: Roskosmos
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003252/ wrote:
Phobos-Grunt, the morning after
The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla Nov. 9, 2011
<<The problem left Phobos-Grunt in a low-Earth orbit in safe mode (a protective state triggered by the spacecraft detecting an unexpected condition that posed risk to the mission). It was still alive and talking to ground stations, having expended none of its precious fuel. All things considered, this is really one of the best states a spacecraft could be in after having suffered a serious problem immediately after launch. Today they plan to establish contact with Phobos-Grunt while it is visible from Baikonur.>>
BMAONE23 wrote:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45208128/ns/technology_and_science-space/ wrote:
<<Phobos-Grunt is also carrying vials of Earth bacteria suited to extreme environments, plant seeds and tiny invertebrate animals known as water bears to see if they can survive in space. It is meant to be the first time microbes carried by a spacecraft spend years in space and go beyond the protective bubble of Earth's magnetic field, testing part of a theory that life may have migrated between planets inside meteorites.>>
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15698439 wrote:
Stricken Mars probe stays silent
By Jonathan Amos 11 November 2011
Science correspondent, BBC News
<<Efforts are continuing to try to regain control of the Russian Mars mission that is stuck circling the Earth. The Phobos-Grunt spacecraft was put in orbit on Wednesday, but failed to fire the engine that was designed to take it on to the Red Planet. Engineers have been using tracking stations around the globe in an attempt to talk to the probe and diagnose its problems - but without success.
The European Space Agency Spacecraft Operations Centre (Esoc) in Darmstadt, Germany, is now involved in trying to establish a link, using its antennas in French Guiana, the Canary Islands and on the Spanish mainland. The US space agency (Nasa) has also offered to do anything that might bring the wayward craft under full control. Doug McCuistion, Nasa's director of Mars exploration, told reporters in a briefing about its own forthcoming Red Planet venture, the Curiosity rover: "We have offered assistance and if they need it, we will provide it to the best of our ability."
Phobos-Grunt launched successfully on its Zenit rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and was dropped off into an elliptical orbit with an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 345km. It was then expected to initiate two firings on its big cruise stage, one to lift it higher in the sky and the second to despatch it to Mars. Neither burn occurred. So far, the repeated passes of Phobos-Grunt over ground stations have failed to yield any telemetry.
The Russian Interfax news agency reported a space industry source on Friday as saying: "Several attempts have been made overnight to receive telemetry from the spacecraft. The result of all of them was nothing. "The chance that the station could be saved is very, very slim," the translation from BBC Monitoring said. "Russia's ground systems located at Baikonur and near Medvezhyi Ozera near Moscow will join in these efforts in the evening."
The community of citizen satellite trackers has, though, reported Phobos-Grunt to be in a stable orientation. Michael Murphy from Dayton, Ohio, posted on Friday: "I just observed a pass of Phobos-Grunt and the Zenit second stage. "The rocket body was tumbling slowly, and the probe itself appeared to be very steady as it passed. "I did not get good timing information, but the probe was definitely steady. I saw no other objects along the track the probe followed," he told the Phobos-Grunt thread on the SeeSat-L website.
Fellow tracker Ted Molczan from Toronto, Canada, has been trying to determine the precise orbit of Phobos-Grunt around the Earth, and thought on Friday he had seen the craft rise slightly. "This could all still turn out to be due in some way to spurious [data], but I suspect the effect is real," he told the same thread. "If venting is occurring, perhaps due to leakage from the propellant system, then the spacecraft could eventually begin to tumble."
If control of Phobos-Grunt cannot be re-established, the focus of interest will very rapidly shift to the spacecraft's certain fall to Earth. Residual air molecules more than 200km above the planet will generate drag on the probe and pull it down faster and faster - although it could be some weeks yet before there is an impact. The spacecraft weighed some 13 tonnes at launch - double the mass of Nasa's recently re-entered UARS satellite. What is more, most of the 13 tonnes is made up by the propellants unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and dinitrogen tetroxide (DTO), both of which are toxic. It was the presence of a large quantity of toxic propellants on the returning spy satellite USA-193 that the American government used to justify its decision to shoot down the spacecraft with a missile in 2008.
If the Phobos-Grunt mission is truly lost, then professional and amateur groups will be modelling the decay in its orbit in an attempt to determine precisely where and when it might come down. As with UARS, much of the spacecraft will burn up in the atmosphere; but any parts made of high-temperature metals, such as titanium or stainless steel, stand a chance of making all the way to the surface. Indeed, it is the fuel tanks that often survive the fall, their spherical shapes enabling them to spin up and dissipate heat more easily.
However, the probability is that any debris would hit the ocean, given that more than 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by water. This was the case with UARS and the German Rosat X-Ray telescope that returned to Earth last month. But no-one wants to see Phobos-Grunt end this way. This exciting mission had been eagerly awaited by scientists all over the world.
Its quest is to land on the Martian moon Phobos and scoop up rock for return to Earth. Such a venture could yield fascinating new insights into the origin of the 27km-wide moon and the planet it circles. The mission is also notable because it carries China's first Mars satellite, Yinghuo-1.>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_96 wrote:<<Mars 96 (sometimes called Mars 8) was a failed Mars mission launched in 1996 to investigate Mars by the Russian Space Forces. The Mars 96 spacecraft was based on the Phobos probes launched to Mars in 1988. They were of a new design at the time and both ultimately failed. For the Mars 96 mission the designers believed they had corrected the flaws of the Phobos probes, but the value of their improvements was never demonstrated due to the destruction of the probe during the launch phase.
It was, however, a very ambitious mission and the heaviest interplanetary probe launched up to that time. The mission included an orbiter, surface stations and surface penetrators. The mission included a large complement of instruments provided by France, Germany, other European countries and the United States. Similar instruments have since been flown on Mars Express, launched in 2003.
The rocket lifted off on November 16, 1996 at 20:48:53 UTC. The rocket performed properly up to parking orbit. The planned second burn of the Block D-2 fourth stage failed to take place. The spacecraft separated and then performed its engine burn automatically. Unfortunately, without the fourth stage burn, the spacecraft accelerated itself back into the Earth's atmosphere. The fourth stage re-entered on a later orbit.
It was originally believed that the Mars 96 assembly burnt up in the atmosphere and the debris fell into the Pacific Ocean. However, in March 1997, the US Space Command admitted that it had miscalculated the satellite's path of re-entry. "We were aware of a number of eyewitness accounts of the re-entry event via the media several weeks after the re-entry occurred," wrote Major Stephen Boylan, Chief of the Media Division at the US Space Command in Colorado Springs. "Upon further analysis, we believe it is reasonable that the impact was in fact on land."
Mars 96 carried four assemblies designed to enter the Martian atmosphere, two surface penetrators and two surface stations. These would almost certainly have survived entry into Earth's atmosphere. The two surface penetrators were designed to survive an impact with the ground. The spacecraft is believed to have crashed somewhere in a 320 km long by 80 wide oval running southwest to northeast and centered 32 km east of Iquique, Chile. No parts of the spacecraft or upper stage have been recovered.>>
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/14/phobos_grunt_still_stranded/ wrote:
Dud Mars probe's explosion will spare Earth's cities
Clock ticking on orbiting 7,500kg tank of fuel
Posted in Space, 14th November 2011
By Brid-Aine Parnell<<The chief of the Russian space agency has assured the public that the stalled and uncommunicative Mars probe Phobos-Grunt will not smash into a populated area of Earth. Vladimir Popovkin, head of Roscosmos, told reporters that if the wayward spacecraft re-enters the Earth's atmosphere, which he believes is still the worst-case scenario, it won't harm anyone.
“There are 7.5 metric tons of fuel in the aluminium tanks on board. We have no doubts that they will explode [and destroy the probe] upon re-entry,” Popovkin said, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. “It is highly unlikely that its parts would reach Earth.”
The chances of contacting the craft are dwindling however and the space agency is giving the rescue attempt until the beginning of December to succeed.
Phobos-Grunt has been stranded in low-Earth orbit since it launched successfully on 9 November, but its engines failed to get it going on its mission to Mars. The probe was supposed to fly to the Red Planet, go around it for a few months and then land on Martian moon Phobos to collect samples before returning to Earth in 2014. Instead, it has been circling our home world while engineers attempt to contact it and establish why it didn't fire its engines to send it on course to Mars. The astroboffins hope there's still a chance to get the probe on its way. However, none of the attempts to get a signal to or from the spacecraft have been successful. “We estimate that the Phobos-Grunt will fly until January, and to make it perform its mission we still have time until the beginning of December,” Popovkin said.
The major problem is how few earth-to-space communication stations there are. Engineers have to sit around until Phobos-Grunt passes over one and then they have a small window in which to send and receive signals. Space boffins have now reduced the power of the signal they're sending up, because the craft is so much lower than it's meant to be, and are trying to lengthen the communication window.
Popovkin said losing the probe "would be a disappointment", but the Russian space programme would go on at pace. “As to Mars - it is a planet that does not like earthlings. Only 30 per cent of Soviet-Russian launches to Mars were successful, the Americans have had 50 per cent success, while all attempts by Japan and Europe have failed so far,” he sniffed.>>
Experts Consider Possibilities for Sending Spacecraft to Moon or Asteroid
If communication with Russia’s troubled Phobos-Grunt is not established by November 21, the window for a trajectory to the Martian moon Phobos, will close, experts say. But this would not mean that the spacecraft could not travel to a different destination. In a statement published earlier today by the news and information agency Ria Novosti, Russian space expert Igor Lisov suggested that Phobos-Grunt could be sent to orbit the Moon – Earth’s Moon, that is – or may be even an asteroid, if communication is restored at any point before the 13-ton probe re-enters Earth’s atmosphere.
orin stepanek wrote:
Hope they get it resolved.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/scien ... .html?_r=1
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/science/space/russia-fights-to-save-mars-probe-after-launch-mishap.html?_r=2 wrote:
<<An unnamed person in Russia’s space industry told the Interfax news agency that there had been warnings before the launching that glitches in the probe’s command and control system had not been fully resolved. “The risk of failure because of its abnormal operation was very high. Unfortunately, the worst forecasts have come true,” the person said.
The Phobos-Grunt mission is Russia’s first to the vicinity of a planet since a 1996 Mars project, which failed shortly after reaching Earth orbit and broke up over the Pacific. The spacecraft has a small return vehicle that is meant to hold about half a pound of soil samples, plus other instruments and equipment.
“If you look at the spacecraft and count the number of instruments on it, very quickly it’s apparent that this is a very complex mission,” said Dwayne A. Day, a space policy analyst at the National Research Council. “They shot for the sky with this one. So far it’s kind of shocking that it ran into problems this early.”
Mr. Day said that Russia’s planetary exploration program had suffered with the country’s economic woes. “The Russian program was pretty much broke in the 1990s and much of the last decade, too,” he said.
“Two things have happened,” he said. “Everybody’s out of practice — the last time they built an interplanetary spacecraft was in the early 1990s. The other problem is that they lost a lot of people. They had a brain drain.”
Mr. Day added that the Russian approach of undertaking a large, complex mission after years with no projects at all contrasted sharply with NASA’s strategy, which includes some smaller missions. “Relatively junior people come in and work on these missions that are relatively fast turnaround,” he said. “This allows them to gain a lot of experience.” >>
