Rely on Europe/Japan to replace shuttle? BIG mistake
- From: Rich <rander3127@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:22:18 -0700 (PDT)
Does American really want to leave all spaceflight in the hands of
these people and their threadbare efforts? Canceling the Shuttle is
as stupid an idea as mothballing the Hubble.
Crunch time for Russia Mars probe
By Anatoly Zak
Science Reporter
Less than two months before the scheduled launch of Russia's flagship
planetary spacecraft, officials are set to recommend a delay until
2011.
The Phobos-Grunt mission aims to land on the Martian moon Phobos to
collect soil samples and return them to Earth.
Sources within the Russian space industry gave RussianSpaceWeb.com
details of the likely postponement.
The Russian space agency Roskosmos is expected to announce the
mission's fate within a week.
The agency's decision will be based on results of testing which the
spacecraft has been undergoing since July at its assembly facility at
NPO Lavochkin in Khimki, near Moscow.
A delay for Phobos-Grunt would also affect China's first Mars probe
Yinghuo 1, as the two craft are due to be launched together on the
same Zenit rocket.
Tight schedule
According to its latest increasingly tight schedule, the Phobos-Grunt
spacecraft had to be shipped to the launch site in Baikonur Cosmodrome
on 26 September 2009 in order to catch a narrow astronomical launch
window to Mars in October of this year.
A previously announced timeline called for the shipment of the
spacecraft to Baikonur in August, only to be pushed back to the middle
of September 2009.
The decision to roll out the vehicle to Baikonur would mean a
commitment to launch this year, while failure to do so would postpone
the mission to 2011.
Industry sources said that despite all efforts, the probe's flight
control systems are likely to need more tests before they can be
considered reliable enough to survive a complex multi-year mission.
Complex demands
The systems will need to be robust enough to cope with complex
manoeuvring in Martian orbit, landing on the surface of Phobos, the
takeoff of the return vehicle and the landing of the capsule
containing the soil samples on Earth.
A further argument to postpone the mission to 2011 would be lack of
duplicate failsafe systems at Russian mission control to guide the
spacecraft into deep space.
Currently Russia's only operational deep space antenna capable of
sending flight control commands to Phobos-Grunt is in Ussuriyisk near
Vladivostok. Any serious problems there would doom the mission.
A second antenna, in Medvezhi Ozera, near St Petersburg, could be
capable of controlling the mission - but only after an upgrade, which
is not expected to be completed until sometime next year.
Launching the spacecraft with only a single operational flight control
antenna would endanger the mission, experts said.
Roskosmos recently reached an agreement with the European Space
Agency, Esa, to use its facilities in the Phobos-Grunt project. But
European ground control stations would only be capable of receiving
data rather than controlling the spacecraft.
Those in favour of postponing the mission to 2011 argue that Russian
scientists have not conducted a deep space mission for more than two
decades, and available time to prepare the launch in 2009 was
inadequate.
In 1988, a pair of Soviet probes was sent to Mars but one failed on
its way to the red planet and the other soon after entering orbit.
Flight control error was blamed for at least one failure.
Russia's latest probe to Mars, launched in 1996, crashed back to Earth
when the launch vehicle failed. Lack of Russian ground control
facilities meant the exact cause was never pinpointed.
Despite many previous unofficial reports that the beleaguered project
would have to be delayed to at least 2011, the Russian space agency
and NPO Lavochkin, the probe's primary developer, have always insisted
that the mission would launch in 2009.
Knock-on effect
According to latest reports, the launch of Phobos-Grunt was pushed to
the beginning of November 2009, essentially beyond the available
launch window to Mars.
It was unclear how such a move would affect the mission, since
launching outside of the astronomical window would limit the mass of
the payload to be carried to Mars.
Delaying Phobos-Grunt from 2009 to 2011 might also have a knock-on
effect on future Russian missions into deep space.
Experts say Phobos-Grunt is relatively well prepared for flight, so it
would need little extra money to be ready for 2011.
However the same personnel and facilities employed in the preparation
of the Phobos-Grunt project, at NPO Lavochkin and the IKI space
research institute in Moscow, will be needed to design subsequent
missions such as the Luna-Glob probe, which - according to the
official schedule - is due to enter orbit around the Moon in 2011.
.
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