Fobos-Grunt

• 1. Introduction

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  Fobos-Grunt lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 20:16 UTC on the 8th of November 2011, carrying the ambitions of Russian planetary science onto its back. The mission had a goal almost no spacecraft had ever attempted: land on Phobos, one of the two small moons of Mars, scoop up to 200 grams of ancient soil, and bring it home. Had it succeeded, it would have been the first spacecraft to return a macroscopic sample from any extraterrestrial body since the Soviet Luna 24 in 1976. The name itself tells you what was at stake. Fobos is the Russian word for Phobos. Grunt means soil. The spacecraft was, in the most literal sense, a machine built to go get some dirt. What happened in the hours after launch, and the years of failures that preceded it, is a story about the gap between ambition and readiness.

• 2. A Long Road to the Pad

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  The project began in 1999, when the Russian Space Research Institute and NPO Lavochkin, the main developer of Soviet and Russian interplanetary probes, launched a 9 million rouble feasibility study. The initial concept drew on designs from the Phobos program probes of the late 1980s. Development formally started in 2001, and a preliminary design was completed in 2004. For years after that, the project barely moved. Low funding levels in the Russian space program kept it in a kind of slow motion until the summer of 2005, when a new government plan for space activities covering 2006-2015 gave Fobos-Grunt a prominent place as a flagship mission. With better money came a launch target: October 2009. That date slipped too. The spacecraft's onboard computers proved difficult to develop, and the internal NPO Lavochkin team fell behind on software integration even though the hardware supplier, a Moscow company called Tehkhom, had delivered on schedule. In January 2010, NPO Lavochkin's head Valeriy N. Poletskiy retired, a departure widely seen as tied to the mission's delays. His replacement, Viktor Khartov, inherited a spacecraft that was still not ready. One silver lining came from the extra time: engineers added a Polish-built drill to the lander as a backup soil extraction device, in case Phobos turned out to be too rocky for the primary scoop.

• 3. What the Mission Carried

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  Lead scientist Alexander Zakharov had described the Phobos sample return project as "possibly the most difficult interplanetary one to date". Part of what made it difficult was how much it was asked to do at once. The spacecraft's total mass at launch was 13,505 kg. The main propulsion unit alone, carrying propellant for the trans-Mars injection burn, accounted for 7,750 kg of that. The lander instrument compartment weighed 550 kg; the earth return vehicle came to 287 kg total. Nestled inside all of this was a 115 kg Chinese Mars orbiter called Yinghuo-1, the product of a cooperative agreement signed by Russia and China on the 26th of March 2007. Yinghuo-1 was to have separated after arrival at Mars and entered an 800 by 80,000 km equatorial orbit, spending a year studying the planet's magnetic field and the interaction between its ionosphere and the solar wind. A second Chinese contribution, the Soil Offloading and Preparation System developed by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, was built into the lander itself as a microgravity grinding tool. The Planetary Society contributed an experiment called the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, which placed selected organisms aboard to test whether life could survive years in interplanetary space. That experiment was itself a test of a hypothesis known as transpermia: the idea that life might travel between planets inside rocks blasted off by impacts. The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences added a radiation measurement experiment. Two Finnish MetNet Mars landers had also been planned for the mission, but weight constraints forced them out before launch.

• 4. The Plan That Died in Orbit

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  After separation from its Zenit-2SB41 launch vehicle, Fobos-Grunt was supposed to spend about 2.5 hours and 1.7 revolutions in an initial parking orbit of 207 by 347 km. Then its main propulsion unit, a design derived from the Fregat upper stage, would fire twice to push it toward Mars. Both engine burns were planned to occur outside the range of Russian ground stations, so the mission team asked amateur observers worldwide to watch the burns through telescopes and report what they saw. That request was never fulfilled by a burn. Engineers soon discovered the spacecraft was still sitting in its original low Earth orbit. The solar panels had deployed, which bought some time, and the probe appeared to be making small autonomous adjustments to keep from falling back to Earth too quickly. But the main engine had never fired. The window to redirect the craft toward Mars would close in early December 2011. Contact was finally established on the 22nd of November 2011, when the European Space Agency's tracking station in Perth, Australia, picked up a signal after modifications were made to the station's 15-metre dish. The following day, over six minutes, Perth received about 400 telemetry frames, but the data volume was too thin to identify the underlying fault. ESA made five more contact attempts between the 28th and the 29th of November, none of which produced a response to engine-firing commands. On the 2nd of December 2011, ESA officially ended its rescue effort, with one analyst describing Fobos-Grunt as "dead in the water".

• 5. The Fall and Its Theories

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  Before re-entry, Fobos-Grunt still carried about 7.51 tonnes of highly toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. Both compounds have melting points close to or just below freezing water, and NASA veteran James Oberg warned they could freeze before ultimately burning up, potentially contaminating wherever they landed. Roscosmos maintained that the probability of solid fragments reaching the surface was highly unlikely and that the entire spacecraft, including Yinghuo-1 and the LIFE module, would be destroyed during re-entry. The spacecraft fell back to Earth on the 15th of January 2012, over the Pacific Ocean. Russian military sources placed the impact 1,247 km west of Wellington Island, Chile. Russian civilian ballistic experts disagreed, saying fragments had spread over a wider area with a midpoint in the Goias state of Brazil. The explanations offered for the failure were just as scattered. Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin initially raised the possibility of foreign sabotage. An unidentified Russian official speculated on the 17th of January 2012 that a U.S. radar installation on the Marshall Islands may have inadvertently disabled the probe. Popovkin later suggested counterfeit microchips, and then on the 1st of February 2012 proposed that a burst of cosmic radiation had caused the onboard computers to reboot into standby mode. Industry experts pushed back on that theory, noting how unlikely such effects are within the protection of Earth's magnetic field. On the 6th of February 2012, the official investigating commission delivered a simpler verdict: a programming error had caused a simultaneous reboot of two working channels of the onboard computer, which meant the rocket pack never fired. Experts added that the specific fault was the end point of broader problems including poor quality control, inadequate testing, and systemic issues in the program.

• 6. What Survived the Wreckage

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  Russian president Dmitry Medvedev suggested those responsible should be punished and perhaps criminally prosecuted. Meanwhile, scientists and engineers at the Russian Space Research Institute and NPO Lavochkin were already sketching the outline of a repeat mission. In January 2012, they called for a mission named Fobos-Grunt-2, also referred to as Boomerang, with a target launch in 2020. Whether Russia would pursue it independently depended partly on whether it joined ESA's ExoMars program. An agreement was reached, and Russia became a full partner; several instruments originally built for Fobos-Grunt were subsequently flown aboard the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. The Russian Academy of Sciences revisited the repeat mission on the 2nd of August 2014, suggesting a revised launch around 2024. An ESA-Roscosmos working group completed a joint study for a possible Phobos sample return mission in August 2015, and Russia submitted a budget proposal in May 2015. As of September 2023, Roscosmos stated its intention to launch Boomerang "after 2030". The plan, if it ever launches, is for Boomerang to serve as the first stage of a broader program called Mars-Grunt, a full Mars sample return mission built from the technologies Fobos-Grunt-2 would demonstrate. The total cost of the original failed mission was budgeted at 5 billion rubles, equivalent to around 163 million U.S. dollars, a sum that bought Russia a brief window in low Earth orbit and a programming error that investigators later traced back to a single simultaneous reboot.