Russians Fight to Save Mars Probe After Mishap

Russians Fight to Save Mars Probe After Mishap
By HENRY FOUNTAIN - New York Times
November 9, 2011
The spacecraft, a high-stakes effort to bring back soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos — and to return Russia to prominence in planetary exploration after a long dry spell — was launched from Kazakhstan atop a Zenit rocket early Wednesday. Russian officials said that the launching was normal. But then, once the spacecraft was in orbit, two planned firings of its propulsion system, intended to send it on the nearly yearlong journey to Mars, did not occur.

“The engines did not fire, not the first or the second time,” said Vladimir Popovkin, director of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

An unnamed person in Russia’s space industry told the Interfax news agency that there had been warnings before the launching that glitches in the probe’s command and control system had not been fully resolved. “The risk of failure because of its abnormal operation was very high. Unfortunately, the worst forecasts have come true,” the person said.

The failure left the 30,000-pound, $170 million probe, called Phobos-Grunt — “grunt” being the Russian word for ground — stuck in an egg-shaped orbit that at its lowest point is just 129 miles above the Earth. The atmosphere, though thin at that altitude, will create enough drag to eventually cause the spacecraft to fall to Earth. When and where that might happen, and how much of the spacecraft might survive a fiery re-entry, is impossible to predict at this point.

Roughly two-thirds of the spacecraft’s weight is in fuels, including hydrazine, which is highly corrosive and toxic. The probe also contains a small amount of radioactive cobalt used in one of its instruments, though that presents no danger, a person at the Kazakhstan launching center told the news agency Ria Novosti.

Engineers were waiting to re-establish communication with the probe — expected early Thursday morning Moscow time — to send new engine-firing instructions to its computers.

But there was no guarantee that the problem was a software one, and the engineers were racing the clock: although the spacecraft has enough power for at least three days and probably longer, the decaying orbit means it could soon reach a point where the engines would not be able to send it away from Earth, said Anatoly Zak, an expert on the Russian space program who tracks the country’s efforts at russianspaceweb.com.

NASA said it would help, if asked. “Should Roscosmos need it, we will do our best to provide the services of the space communications and navigation networks, which support NASA’s satellites and spacecraft,” said Michael J. Braukus, a NASA spokesman.

The problems with the spacecraft are the latest in a string of troubles for Russia’s space efforts, including the failure in August of a Soyuz rocket — the type that, with the end of the shuttle program, NASA now depends on to send astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station. Russian engineers identified and fixed the problem, and a Soyuz rocket is scheduled to be launched Sunday night, ferrying two Russians and an American to the station.

NASA is also scheduled to send its own spacecraft to Mars this month, launching Nov. 25 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. NASA calls its Mars Science Laboratory “the largest and most capable rover to be sent to another planet.”

The Phobos-Grunt mission is Russia’s first to the vicinity of a planet since a 1996 Mars project, which failed shortly after reaching Earth orbit and broke up over the Pacific. The spacecraft has a small return vehicle that is meant to hold about half a pound of soil samples, plus other instruments and equipment.

“If you look at the spacecraft and count the number of instruments on it, very quickly it’s apparent that this is a very complex mission,” said Dwayne A. Day, a space policy analyst at the National Research Council. “They shot for the sky with this one. So far it’s kind of shocking that it ran into problems this early.”

Mr. Day said that Russia’s planetary exploration program had suffered with the country’s economic woes. “The Russian program was pretty much broke in the 1990s and much of the last decade, too,” he said.

“Two things have happened,” he said. “Everybody’s out of practice — the last time they built an interplanetary spacecraft was in the early 1990s. The other problem is that they lost a lot of people. They had a brain drain.”

Mr. Day added that the Russian approach of undertaking a large, complex mission after years with no projects at all contrasted sharply with NASA’s strategy, which includes some smaller missions. “Relatively junior people come in and work on these missions that are relatively fast turnaround,” he said. “This allows them to gain a lot of experience.”

The Phobos-Grunt spacecraft is also carrying a 250-pound Chinese satellite that is meant to orbit Mars and study its environment. “It’s interesting that the Chinese were sending along a piggyback payload,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “They have to be disappointed” that the mission is in jeopardy, he added.

Mr. Pace said the Chinese had encountered difficulties cooperating with Europe on the Galileo global satellite navigation system, ultimately withdrawing from the project in 2007. And talk of cooperation in space with the United States had generated political controversy in Washington.

“You wonder what they must be thinking about international cooperation,” he said.

Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from Moscow.