Russia delays first Chinese Mars mission to 2011

William Atkins
Saturday, 03 October 2009 19:22

Science - Space

The Phobos-Grunt mission has been delayed by two years in order to provide better reliability to the mission. When launched, it will go to Mars and its moon Phobos. Part of the spacecraft will return samples back to Earth.


With a scheduled launch in October 2009, the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), Anatoly Perminov, announced that Russian scientists need additional time for reliability testing on its spacecraft.

The scientists also require extra time to study the surface of Phobos in order to provide the best ways to collect soil samples from the moon. The mission will be delayed until 2011, the next launch window for the mission.

The Russian mission (Phobos-Grunt, or “Phobos Soil”), through its space agency Roscosmos, is a sample return mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars.



[Image of Mars (left), courtesy of PDphoto (http://www.pdphoto.org/), and Phobos (right), courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, and the University of Arizona (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phobos_colour_2008.jpg)]

The irregularly shaped Phobos is one of two moons of Mars, with the other one being Deimos.

It is the larger of the two moons, and the closer of the two moons to the planet. Phobos orbits about Mars at an average altitude of about 5,800 miles (9,370 kilometers).

The mission includes the Russian Phobos-Grunt lander and the Chinese sub-satellite orbiter Yinghuo-1 (“Firefly 1”).

It is the first Mars mission for the Chinese, through its space agency, China National Space Administration (CNSA). For the Russians, the last mission to Mars was in 1996 (Mars 96) but it failed to accomplish its mission, being destroyed while launching into space.

Page two continues with comments from the Chinese head of the Yinghuo-1 probe.