NASA has been batting a thousand recently in terms of science probes and rovers. The Opportunity and Spirit rovers on Mars have/had been wildly successful. And this year alone NASA has launched such projects like Juno and GRAIL. Soon the Mar Science Laboratory, with its super-sized payload Curiosity, will depart for Mars. Although being at the top may seem good for the US, it could be considered detrimental in some way for science. Luckily, the Russians are planning to make a comeback.
Just this last Tuesday, the Russians have launched their most ambitious robotics mission yet: a sample return from Mars’ largest moon Phobos. The mission, Phobos Grunt, should reach Mars orbit by late 2012. There it will collect samples of regolith that will be launched back toward Earth. Scientists predict that Phobos should also have tiny bits of Martian soil on it from asteroid impacts blasting off the planet and into space. This is the ultimate prize. But why not go directly to Mars then? Mainly because the 0.38 G will give the return samples severe difficulties. Although I do not know for sure, I think a person could jump out of the gravitational field of Phobos, which is only 16 miles wide. If all goes well, the sample should be back by late 2014. The craft itself will stay behind to make further measurements and observations.
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| If all goes well, the Phobos Grunt spacecraft will reach Mars by late 2012. |
The Russians even let two projects hitch rides on the spacecraft too. First is the Chinese Yinghuo-1 which is to be their first Martian satellite. It will stay in orbit for 2 years and study the planet’s atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetic field. Although the satellite will hopefully be of success, one can see this project is nowhere near as unprecedented as its two companions.
Lastly is the Planetary Society’s LIFE (Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment). It is well known that bacteria reproduce very quickly. For this reason they evolve pretty fast too. 18 years in a custom environment and you could have your own species. So the Planetary Society decided to fund a project to test life’s ability to adapt to most every environment and a theory called transpermia. This theory states that life can survive on a rock blasted off from meteor impact and be transported from one planet to another. The small biomodule containing to specimens was launched with Phobos Grunt and will hopefully return with the regolith samples for biologists and geneticists to study. For more information on the selection of the microorganisms, please visit:
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/innovative_technologies/life/organisms.html
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| 11 species, 31 tubes |
Three great projects, too little time. Unfortunately, difficulties arose soon after the Phobos Grunt launch. According to the BBC, this is how it went down:
• The probe launches successfully on its Zenit rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome
• It is dropped off 11 minutes later in an elliptical orbit some 345km above the Earth
• Two firings from the probe's hydrazine-fuelled cruise stage were planed over South America
• The first, lasting 11.5 minutes, should have raised the orbit of Phobos-Grunt to 4,000km
• A second burn, four hours into the mission, was to have sent the probe on a path to Mars
• Russian space agency officials say neither burn on the big cruise stage took place
• The probe remains in a low-Earth orbit while the anomaly is investigated by engineers
• If it is a software error, new commands could be uploaded to correct it
• Hardware failure would doom the probe unless a switch to a back-up system is possible
The Russians have until Friday the 11th to fix the issue before the projects fail. For the benefit of science, we all hope they succeed.
Sources:
Phobos Grunt image:
http://www.space.com/13545-russia-launches-mars-sample-phobos-grunt-spacecraft.html
LIFE capsule image:
https://planetary.org/special/life/index_email.html
Information:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15631472
http://www.space.com/13545-russia-launches-mars-sample-phobos-grunt-spacecraft.html
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/innovative_technologies/life/
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