The Russian Federal Space Agency, frequently referred to as Roscosmos, hasn’t had much luck with interplanetary missions in the past 20 years. RFSA’s most recent space probe, Phobos-Grunt, has a saga that deviates little from the outcomes of predecessors such as Mars 98. Launched on November 9, 2011, Phobos-Grunt was meant to land on Mars’s moon Phobos, collect soil and rock samples, and return to Earth around 2014. After reaching low-earth orbit, however, the rockets intended to launch the spacecraft towards Mars failed to fire, leaving Phobos-Grunt stranded. On November 24, the mission was pronounced a failure as pieces of the spacecraft began re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
Phobos-Grunt carried Yinghuo-1, the orbiter intended as the first Chinese spacecraft to explore Mars, which the China National Space Administration declared lost on November 17, 2011, as a result of Phobos-Grunt’s inability to leave low-earth orbit. The Russian space probe also contained a small capsule of microorganisms from the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, a mission developed by the government-independent Planetary Society to test the idea that life could survive travel through space if protected by rock blasted from one planet to another.
Just a few hours after its launch and entry into low-earth orbit, Phobos-Grunt’s first set of rockets should have fired, sending the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit, and from there, a second set of rockets would have sent it on its journey towards Mars. The first rocket burn, however, never took place, and the probe became stuck in parking orbit around Earth. Twice, on November 22 and November 23, the European Space Agency’s tracking station made contact with Phobos-Grunt, but the communication line was insufficient to command the probe’s engines to fire to raise its orbit or to receive enough information to determine the cause of the malfunction.
The remaining pieces of Phobos-Grunt will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on January 15, give or take a few days; predictions differ as to how much of the spacecraft will survive the trip through the Earth’s atmosphere, by some accounts as many as 20 or 30 remnants totaling 440 pounds could reach the ground while other theories say the entire spacecraft will be destroyed. No serious injury or property damage from space debris has been confirmed, and the likelihood of debris from Phobos-Grunt posing a hazard to people is small, given the percentage of the Earth covered by water and the population distribution on land.
The greatest concerns about Phobos-Grunt’s return to Earth surround the toxic rocket fuel onboard the spacecraft, which has the potential to survive re-entry and pose a hazard to people on Earth. In 2008, USA-193, a disabled US spy satellite, was destroyed just before re-entry by a missile from a US warship. The fuel tank on USA-193, however, was made of titanium, which has a higher melting point than aluminum and therefore had a better chance of surviving re-entry than Phobos-Grunt’s aluminum fuel tank. Heiner Klinkrad, head of the space debris office of the European Space Agency, predicts that Phobos-Grunt’s rocket fuel will leak from its aluminum tank about 60 miles from the earth and burn up before reaching land, though the outcome could be different if the fuel froze during the spacecraft’s nearly two-month orbit of Earth.
The last fully successful Russian interplanetary mission was Vega 2, which landed on Venus and transmitted data from the surface for 56 minutes, in 1985. In 1989, Phobos 2, a Mars orbiter, was partially successful, in that it returned 38 photos from Mars’s surface, but unsuccessful in that it failed to release two small landers to Mars’s moon Phobos. In 1996, the probe Mars 96 also failed to leave Earth’s orbit, eventually re-entering the atmosphere and breaking up over the Pacific Ocean. Phobos-Grunt was Russia’s first interplanetary mission since the failure of Mars 96.
As a result of the Phobos-Grunt mission failure, Russia may accept an offer to join future NASA-European Space Agency missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018. Phobos-Grunt cost Roscosmos around $163 million and the global debt crisis has impacted the budget of both NASA and the European Space Agency, making the possibility of Russia joining future missions a financial win for all parties involved. No formal offer to participate has yet been made to Roscosmos, but the agency would be willing to send exploration equipment along with the mission or to assist with the rocket that launches the ship into space, though they would prefer the first option.
While the failure of Phobos-Grunt cast a shadow on the Russian Federal Space Agency and became just another failure in a long line of difficult and trying interplanetary mission failures for Russia, the program appears to be taking the outcome in its stride. Russia has plans for a manned mission to the moon sometime between 2020 and 2025, and also wants to continue developing programs and technology for deep-space exploration.
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