Марсқа жол тартқан сәтсіз ғарыш сапары

A failed spacecraft mission to Mars

Fobos Grunt or Phobos Grunt (Фобос Грунт, where грунт refers to the ground in the narrow geological meaning of any type of soil or rock exposed on the surface) was an attempted Russian sample return mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. Fobos Grunt also carried the Chinese Mars orbiter Yinghuo 1 and the tiny Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment funded by the Planetary Society. It was launched on 8 November 2011, at 20:16 UTC, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, but subsequent rocket burns intended to set the craft on a course for Mars failed, leaving it stranded in low Earth orbit. The return vehicle was to have returned to Earth in August 2014, carrying up to of soil from Phobos. Funded by the Russian Federal Space Agency and developed by Lavochkin and the Russian Space Research Institute, Fobos Grunt was the first Russian led interplanetary mission since the failed Mars 96. The last successful interplanetary missions were the Soviet Vega 2 in 1985–1986, and the partially successful Phobos 2 in 1988–1989. Fobos Grunt was designed to become the first spacecraft to return a macroscopic sample from an extraterrestrial body since Luna 24 in 1976.

The cost of the project was 1.5 billion rubles (US$64.4 million). Project funding for the timeframe 2009–2012, including post launch operations, was about 2.4 billion rubles. The total cost of the mission was to have been 5 billion rubles (US$163 million). According to lead scientist Alexander Zakharov, the entire spacecraft and most of the instruments were new, though the designs drew upon the nation's legacy of three successful Luna missions, which in the 1970s retrieved a few hundred grams of Moon rocks. Zakharov had described the Phobos sample return project as "possibly the most difficult interplanetary one to date". In June 2006, NPO Lavochkin announced that it had begun manufacturing and testing the development version of the spacecraft's onboard equipment. On 26 March 2007, Russia and China signed a cooperative agreement on the joint exploration of Mars, which included sending China's first interplanetary probe, Yinghuo 1, to Mars together with the Fobos Grunt spacecraft. Yinghuo 1 weighed and would have been released by the main spacecraft into a Mars orbit. Phobos soil sampling and downloading were developed by the GEOHI RAN Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Vernadski Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical chemistry) and the integrated scientific studies of Phobos and Mars by remote and contact methods were the responsibility of the Russian Space Research Institute,

The Chinese Yinghuo 1 orbiter was launched together with Fobos Grunt. In late 2012, after a 10–11.5 month cruise, Yinghuo 1 would have separated and entered an 800 × 80,000 km equatorial orbit (5° inclination) with a period of three days. The spacecraft was expected to remain on Martian orbit for one year. Yinghuo 1 would have focused mainly on the study of the external environment of Mars. Space center researchers expected to use photographs and data to study the magnetic field of Mars and the interaction between ionospheres, escape particles and solar wind. A second Chinese payload, the Soil Offloading and Preparation System (SOPSYS), was integrated in the lander. SOPSYS was a microgravity grinding tool developed by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Another payload on Fobos Grunt was an experiment from the Planetary Society called Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment; its goal was to test whether selected organisms can survive a few years in deep space by flying them through interplanetary space. The experiment would have tested one aspect of transpermia, the hypothesis that life could survive space travel, if protected inside rocks blasted by impact off one planet to land on another. The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences contributed with a radiation measurement experiment on Fobos Grunt. Two MetNet Mars landers developed by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, were planned to be included as payload of the Fobos Grunt mission, but weight constraints on the spacecraft required dropping the MetNet landers from the mission. On 21 September 2009, the mission was officially announced to be delayed until the next launch window in 2011. A main reason for the delay was difficulties encountered during development of the spacecraft's onboard computers. While the Moscow based company Tehkhom provided the computer hardware on time, the internal NPO Lavochkin team responsible for integration and software development fell behind schedule. The retirement of NPO Lavochkin's head Valeriy N. Poletskiy in January 2010 was widely seen as linked to the delay of Fobos Grunt. Viktor Khartov was appointed the new head of the company. During the extra development time resulting from the delay, a Polish built drill was added to the Phobos lander as a back up soil extraction device.

The spacecraft arrived at Baikonur Cosmodrome on 17 October 2011 and was transported to Site 31 for pre launch processing. The Zenit 2SB41 launch vehicle carrying Fobos Grunt successfully lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 20:16 UTC on 8 November 2011. The Zenit booster inserted the spacecraft into an initial elliptical low Earth orbit with an inclination of 51.4°.

It was expected that after 2.5 hours and 1.7 revolutions in the initial orbit, the autonomous main propulsion unit (MDU), derived from the Fregat upper stage, would conduct its firing to insert the spacecraft into the elliptical orbit (250 km x 4150–4170 km) with a period of about 2.2 hours. After the completion of the first burn, the external fuel tank of the propulsion unit was expected to be jettisoned, with ignition for a second burn to depart Earth orbit scheduled for one orbit, or 2.1 hours, after the end of the first burn. The propulsion module constitutes the cruise stage bus of Fobos Grunt. According to original plans, Mars orbit arrival had been expected during September 2012 and the return vehicle was scheduled to reach Earth in August 2014. Following what would have been the planned end of the first burn, the spacecraft could not be located in the target orbit. The spacecraft was subsequently discovered to still be in its initial parking orbit and it was determined that the burn had not taken place. Even though it had not been contacted, the spacecraft seemed to be actively adjusting its perigee (the point it is closest to Earth in its orbit).

On 22 November 2011, a signal from the probe was picked up by the European Space Agency's tracking station in Perth, Australia, after it had sent the probe the command to turn on one of its transmitters. The European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, reported that the contact was made at 20:25 UTC on 22 November 2011 after some modifications had been made to the dish facility in Perth to improve its chances of getting a signal. No telemetry was received in this communication. It remained unclear whether the communications link would have been sufficient to command the spacecraft to switch on its engines to take it on its intended trajectory toward Mars. Roscosmos officials said that the window of opportunity to salvage Fobos Grunt would close in early December 2011. The amount of information received during this communication was not sufficient, and therefore it was not possible to identify the problem with the probe. Further communication attempts made by ESA were unsuccessful and contact was not reestablished. The space vehicle did not respond to the commands sent by the European Space Agency to raise its orbit. Roscosmos provided these commands to ESA. ESA failed to communicate with the space probe in all of the five opportunities the agency had between 28 and 29 November 2011. During those occasions, the spacecraft did not comply with orders to fire the engines and raise its orbit. The Russian space agency then requested that ESA repeat the orders. The European Space Agency decided to end the efforts to contact the probe on 2 December 2011, with one analyst saying Fobos Grunt appeared "dead in the water". However, ESA made teams available to assist the Fobos Grunt mission if there was a change in situation.

Before reentry, the spacecraft still carried about 7.51 tonnes of highly toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide on board. This was mostly fuel for the spacecraft's upper stage. These compounds, with melting points of 2 °C and −11.2 °C, are normally kept in liquid form and were expected to burn out during re entry.

Initially, the head of Roscosmos Vladimir Popovkin, suggested that the Fobos Grunt failure might have been the result of sabotage by a foreign nation. He also stated that risky technical decisions had been made because of limited funding. On 17 January 2012, an unidentified Russian official speculated that a U. S. radar stationed on the Marshall Islands may have inadvertently disabled the probe, but cited no evidence. Popovkin suggested the microchips may have been counterfeit, then he announced on 1 February 2012 that a burst of cosmic radiation may have caused computers to reboot and go into a standby mode. Industry experts cast doubt on the claim citing how unlikely the effects of such a burst are in low Earth orbit, inside the protection of Earth's magnetic field. On 6 February 2012, the commission investigating the mishap concluded that Fobos Grunt mission failed because of "a programming error which led to a simultaneous reboot of two working channels of an onboard computer". The craft's rocket pack never fired due to the computer reboot, leaving the craft stranded in Earth orbit. Although the specific failure was identified, experts suggest it was the culmination of poor quality control, lack of testing, security issues and corruption. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev suggested that those responsible should be punished and perhaps criminally prosecuted.

The planned landing site at Phobos was a region from 5°S to 5°N, 230° to 235°E. Soil sample collection would begin immediately after the lander touched down on Phobos, with collection lasting 2–7 days. An emergency mode existed for the case of communications breakdown, which enabled the lander to automatically launch the return rocket to deliver the samples to Earth. The samples would be loaded into a capsule which would then be moved inside a special pipeline into the descent module by inflating an elastic bag within the pipe with gas. Following the aerodynamic braking to the conical descent vehicle would perform a hard landing without a parachute within the Sary Shagan test range in Kazakhstan. The vehicle did not have any radio equipment.

Barry E. DiGregorio, Director of the International Committee Against Mars Sample Return (ICAMSR), criticised the LIFE experiment carried by Fobos Grunt as a violation of the Outer Space Treaty due to the possibility of contamination of Phobos or Mars with the microbial spores and live bacteria it contains should it have lost control and crash landed on either body. It is speculated that the heat resistant extremophile bacteria could survive such a crash, on the basis that Microbispora bacteria survived the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. According to Fobos Grunt Chief Designer Maksim Martynov, the probability of the probe accidentally reaching the surface of Mars was much lower than the maximum specified for Category III missions, the type assigned to Fobos Grunt and defined in COSPAR's planetary protection policy (in accordance with Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty).