Monday, November 07, 2011

Russian Mars - Phobos sample mission with Chinese Orbiter and Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment - set to launch

This week's issue of The Space Review informs me that I should be watching to see if the Russian launch of the Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars makes it off successfully. It is set to launch November 9, 2011.
- LRK -

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Welcome to this week's issue of The Space Review:
http://www.thespacereview.com/

Phobos sample return launches tomorrow
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This week Russia will launch Phobos-Grunt, a mission to travel to Mars and return a sample of the Martian moon Phobos. Lou Friedman describes the mission and an unusual experiment from The Planetary Society that is onboard the spacecraft.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1966/1

Red moon around a Red Planet
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Phobos-Grunt is a very ambitious mission for any space power, let alone for a country that hasn't launched a Mars mission in 15 years. Dwayne Day writes that it may be too ambitious a mission, but if successful could have a major payoff for planetary exploration.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1965/1

Will Russia end its curse at Mars?
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Probos-Grunt is the latest in a long line of Russian/Soviet Mars missions, most of which failed. Doug Messier examines the history of that program and whether this mission can break from that history.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1964/1

snip
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt
Fobos-Grunt (Russian: Фобос-Грунт, lit. «Phobos-Soil») is a sample return mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. Funded by the Russian space agency Roscosmos and developed by NPO Lavochkin and the Russian Space Research Institute, Fobos-Grunt is to become the first Russian interplanetary mission since the failed Mars 96. It is also set to become the first spacecraft to return a macroscopic extraterrestrial sample from a planetary body since Luna 24 in 1976.^[3] Launch is scheduled for 8 November 2011 from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The spacecraft is expected to reach Mars' orbit in September 2012, with landing on Phobos scheduled for February 2013. The return vehicle, carrying up to 200 g of soil from Phobos, is expected to be back on Earth in August 2014.
The Chinese Mars orbiter Yinghuo-1 will be sent together with the mission, as will the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment funded by the Planetary Society.
snip
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More info and pictures.
See the links on the page as well
- LRK -

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http://www.universetoday.com/90373/russia-fuels-phobos-grunt-and-sets-mars-launch-for-november-9/

Russia Fuels Phobos-Grunt and sets Mars Launch for November 9
by Ken Kremer on October 29, 2011

Russia’s Space Agency, Roscosmos, has set November 9 as the launch date for the Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars and its tiny moon Phobos. Roscosmos has officially announced that the audacious mission to retrieve the first ever soil samples from the surface of Phobos will blastoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan atop a Zenit-2SB rocket at 00:26 a.m. Moscow time.
Roscosmos said that engineers have finished loading all the propellants into the Phobos-Grunt main propulsion module (cruise stage), Phobos lander and Earth return module at Facility 31 at Baikonur.

snip
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With a successful launch we will just have a long wait to see how everything goes. :-)
- LRK -

There have been a number of missions to Mars.
See a list here.
- LRK -
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/spacecraft_planetary_mars.html

Thanks for looking up with me.

- LRK -
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http://www.thestatecolumn.com/science/russia-spacecraft-soil-mars-moon/