Fobos-Grunt

Fobos-Grunt (Фобос-Грунт, meaning “Phobos-soil”) was a Russian mission designed to collect a sample from Phobos, one of Mars’s moons, and return it to Earth. It was the first Russian-led interplanetary mission since the failed Mars 96, and the last successful Soviet interplanetary missions had been Vega 2 in 1985–1986 and the partially successful Phobos 2 in 1988–1989. The spacecraft also carried China’s first Mars orbiter, Yinghuo-1, and the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, a Planetary Society project testing whether organisms could survive deep space. Launched on 8 November 2011 at 20:16 UTC from Baikonur Cosmodrome, the rocket burns meant to send it toward Mars failed, stranding it in low Earth orbit. Attempts to reactivate it were unsuccessful, and it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere uncontrollably on 15 January 2012 over the Pacific Ocean west of Chile. The return vehicle was intended to bring back up to 200 grams of Phobos soil in August 2014, which would have made it the first spacecraft to return a macroscopic sample from an extraterrestrial body since Luna 24 in 1976.

The project was funded by the Russian Federal Space Agency and developed by Lavochkin and the Russian Space Research Institute. The chief designer was Maksim Martynov, and lead scientist Alexander Zakharov described the mission as “possibly the most difficult interplanetary one to date.” The total cost was planned at 5 billion rubles (US$163 million), with 1.5 billion rubles for the project itself and about 2.4 billion rubles for 2009–2012 funding including post-launch operations. Most of the spacecraft and instruments were new, though designs drew on three successful Soviet Luna missions from the 1970s that retrieved Moon rocks.

Development began in 1999 with a 9 million rouble feasibility study by the Russian Space Research Institute and NPO Lavochkin, the main developer of Soviet and Russian interplanetary probes. The initial design resembled the probes from the Phobos program of the late 1980s. Work started in 2001, and a preliminary design was completed in 2004, but the project stalled due to low funding until a new government space plan for 2006–2015 made Fobos-Grunt a flagship mission. With improved funding, the launch was set for October 2009. The design was revised several times, and international partners were invited. In June 2006, NPO Lavochkin began manufacturing an