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Fobos-Grunt \u2013 which was also hosting China\u2019s first Mars probe, Yinghuo-1 as a passenger \u2013 enjoyed a nominal launch via a Zenit-2 launch vehicle, which occurred at 02:16 local time on November 8 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.<\/p>\n
All launch events were nominal, until problems were revealed shortly after Fobos-Grunt had been set to perform an orbit-raising manoeuvre two and a half hours after lift-off, prior to a second burn 126 minutes later, which would have taken it into heliocentric orbit to begin its journey to Mars.<\/p>\n
Both burns failed to materialize, resulting in the spacecraft\u2019s current predicament of being stuck wandering around in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).<\/p>\n
There is now no hope of the spacecraft carrying out its mission to Phobos, despite a late boost when a level of communications were established, thanks to a modified dish on one of the European Space Agency (ESA) assets in Perth, Australia.<\/p>\n
Spaceflight
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/D5.jpg\" "\\"D5\\"")
This was a great achievement on its own, as challenges associated with communicating with Fobos-Grunt during passes over ground stations included a potential blockage by the yet-to-be-used fuel tank of the low gain antennas.<\/p>\nThis tank \u2013 located on the aft of the cruise stage \u2013 would be expended and released in the event of both burns being completed. It is understood the spacecraft was never designed to be commanded prior to these two burns.<\/p>\n
With the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany passing on information gained by the Perth station to NPO Lavochkin, operator of the mission on behalf of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, the ultimate goal was to gain telemetry from the spacecraft to check its health, prior to a potential route to send operational commands.<\/p>\n
With very short windows of opportunity to send communications to Fobos-Grunt as it raced overhead in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), controllers only had a matter of minutes to send commands, which related to switching on the the spacecraft\u2019s transmitter and send back a confirmation signal.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/W21.jpg\" "\\"W2\\"")
Some telemetry was gained, along it was understood to be incomplete and \u201cgarbled\u201d. Russian media also reported that a second dish \u2013 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome \u2013 had made a level of contact with the spacecraft, although this was believed to be only a short term success.<\/p>\nWhile it appears clear that no useful commands were successfully received during the short period contact was established, the spacecraft soon went silent again, leading to ESA officially giving up after numerous attempts to talk to Fobos-Grunt without success.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn consultation and agreement with Phobos-Grunt mission managers, ESA engineers will end tracking support. Efforts to send commands to and receive data from the Russian Mars mission via ESA ground stations have not succeeded; no response has been seen from the satellite,\u201d noted an official ESA release.<\/p>\n
\u201cESA teams remain available to assist the Phobos-Grunt mission if indicated by any change in the situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
As such, the spacecraft\u2019s fate now appears certain, as much as challenges remain in knowing when exactly the spacecraft will return to Earth for a destructive re-entry.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/A310.jpg\" "\\"A310\\"")
This sad event will be of great interest, given the spacecraft\u2019s 13,500 kg of mass, most of which is made up of the highly toxic propellants unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and dinitrogen tetroxide (DTO). Its mass is double that of NASA\u2019s defunct Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS), which re-entered in September of this year.<\/p>\nAt the time, NASA went to great lengths to emphasize that even if any surviving elements of UARS\u2019 hardware had reached the ground, the chances of it being a threat to the human population were tiny.<\/p>\n
The uncontrolled entry did find its way into the mainstream media despite NASA\u2019s attempts to show it wasn\u2019t a major threat, backed up by a Special Safety Topic review by NASA, which looked into the hazards posed by space hardware fragmentation during re-entry, with the aim to apply further mitigation to any potential risks from hardware breaking up and surviving entry \u2013 in turn threatening human life on the ground.<\/p>\n
In the end, the satellite \u2013 which was originally launched on Shuttle Discovery during STS-48 \u2013 re-entered over water.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/B21.jpg\" "\\"B21\\"")
Notably, no major items of hardware on Fobos-Grunt have been listed as potentially surviving entry, while the aluminium tanks containing the large amount of propellant mass are likely to be some of the initial hardware to succumb to the destructive forces of entry.<\/p>\nThe spacecraft\u2019s orbit can be observed via amateur and professional groups, allowing for a level of modelling to be carried out on its decaying orbit, although \u2013 providing no control is established \u2013 the exact entry location of the probe won\u2019t be predicted until shortly before the event.<\/p>\n
It is currently estimated that the entry will occur sometime in January of next year, handing Russia a sad record of all of its 19 missions to the Red Planet since the 1960s resulting in failure.<\/p>\n
(Images: Via Roscosmos and ESA)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite a small period of time where it was hoped communications and commanding might be established with the stricken Fobos-Grunt spacecraft, it now appears the Russian probe\u2019s future is one which will see it head towards a fiery end, as its orbit continues decay over time. The likely scenario now points to a destructive re-entry […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9152,2317,7900],"class_list":["post-40262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-fobos-grunt","tag-phobos","tag-russian"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40262"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}