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Mighty Russian Rocket Poops Out
Russian engineers are fighting to save the country's latest mission to Mars. The Phobos-Grunt probe launched successfully but then failed to fire the engine to put it on the correct path to the Red Planet. Russian space agency officials say the craft is currently stuck in an Earth orbit and that engineers have three days to correct the fault before the probe's batteries run out.
The project is Russia's most ambitious space venture in recent years. It has been designed to collect rock and dust samples from Mars' moon Phobos and bring them back for study in labs on Earth. Scientists hope the dusty debris would provide fresh insights into the origin of the 27km-wide moon, which many scientists suspect may actually be a captured asteroid. The venture is also significant because it is carrying China's first Mars satellite.
Yinghuo-1 is riding piggyback on Phobos-Grunt. The two craft lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Zenit rocket at 00:16 local time on Wednesday (20:16 GMT Tuesday) and were dropped off in an elliptical orbit around the Earth 11 minutes later. Almost two and a half hours into the mission, the huge cruise stage attached to Phobos-Grunt should then have made the first of two firings, to raise the orbit and to send the mission on to Mars. Russian officials say neither of those planned engine burns occurred. Reports suggest the spacecraft attempted to orientate itself in space using the stars, failed to pick them up and therefore did not execute the firings as planned.
"It looks like the engine system has not worked," Vladimir Popovkin, the head of the Russian space agency (Roscosmos), explained. "It seems it couldn't reorient itself away from the Sun towards the stars so the sidewall closed. It was foreseen by the flight program. Now, we have found its location, and we have to unpack the sidewall, to check the telemetry and after that we will restart the spacecraft control program to reboot the mission. The craft is in a support orbit. The fuel tanks were not jettisoned after the first switch-on." And he added: "I would not say it's a failure; it's a non-standard situation, but it is a working situation."
The project is Russia's most ambitious space venture in recent years. It has been designed to collect rock and dust samples from Mars' moon Phobos and bring them back for study in labs on Earth. Scientists hope the dusty debris would provide fresh insights into the origin of the 27km-wide moon, which many scientists suspect may actually be a captured asteroid. The venture is also significant because it is carrying China's first Mars satellite.
Yinghuo-1 is riding piggyback on Phobos-Grunt. The two craft lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Zenit rocket at 00:16 local time on Wednesday (20:16 GMT Tuesday) and were dropped off in an elliptical orbit around the Earth 11 minutes later. Almost two and a half hours into the mission, the huge cruise stage attached to Phobos-Grunt should then have made the first of two firings, to raise the orbit and to send the mission on to Mars. Russian officials say neither of those planned engine burns occurred. Reports suggest the spacecraft attempted to orientate itself in space using the stars, failed to pick them up and therefore did not execute the firings as planned.
"It looks like the engine system has not worked," Vladimir Popovkin, the head of the Russian space agency (Roscosmos), explained. "It seems it couldn't reorient itself away from the Sun towards the stars so the sidewall closed. It was foreseen by the flight program. Now, we have found its location, and we have to unpack the sidewall, to check the telemetry and after that we will restart the spacecraft control program to reboot the mission. The craft is in a support orbit. The fuel tanks were not jettisoned after the first switch-on." And he added: "I would not say it's a failure; it's a non-standard situation, but it is a working situation."
I'm sure things will be all smoothed out in no time
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