 |
 |
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
|
The Planetary Society BlogBy Emily LakdawallaPhobos-Grunt and Yinghuo-1 have completed thermal vacuum testingJul. 30, 2011 | 00:20 PDT | 07:20 UTC
If you're ever looking for information on the status of a Russian mission, the place to go is Anatoly Zak's russianspaceweb.com. Browsing there this morning I was very happy to see that the Russian Phobos sample return mission, Phobos-Grunt, has passed a key milestone in its preparation for launch: it successfully completed its thermal vacuum testing in June. From the photos it appears that the Chinese Mars orbiter Yinghuo-1, which will hitch a ride on Phobos-Grunt to Mars orbit, then part ways with the Russian spacecraft, was stacked with Phobos-Grunt during this testing.
It's sort of late in the game for Phobos-Grunt to be going through this testing, but Zak explains on his website that the testing was delayed because of late delivery of electronics and radio testing. Tests of those systems had to be completed before the spacecraft could be fully assembled. The thermal vacuum test was conducted from June 6 to 20, and the spacecraft has now been shipped back to its assembly facility. When is it going to launch? According to Zak: "During the Spektr-R launch campaign in the middle of July 2011, the head of NPO Lavochkin, Viktor Khartov, told reporters that the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft would be delivered to Baikonur [Russia's launch facility] at the end of September 2011, with its launch scheduled for Nov. 3-5, 2011." Now that I've seen an assembled spacecraft and that I actually have a somewhat official launch date to report, I'll add Phobos-Grunt and Yinghuo-1 to my monthly "what's up" roundup. Stay tuned for that! There are more pictures on Lavochkin's news page but for some reason the Cyrillic characters are not displaying properly for me on that page, so I can't run the text through Google Translate, so I can only guess what they show. Most of the photos on that page are of the Spektr-R space radio telescope, but a few are of Phobos-Grunt. I believe that the photo below, dated June 27, is a picture of Phobos-Grunt in its shipping container, having arrived at its assembly facility after thermal vacuum testing. Note that the Chinese Yinghuo-1 orbiter is stacked underneath Phobos-Grunt -- you can see its dish and solar panels. This differs from earlier concepts I've seen that show Yinghuo-1 stacked on top of Phobos-Grunt. Comparing it to the thermal vac photos, you can see the same octagonal frame, wrapped in thermal blanketing, stacked underneath the Phobos-Grunt landing legs; under that is presumably the rocket engine that will fire to insert Phobos-Grunt and Yinghuo-1 into Mars orbit.
Post this page to:
CommentsThis comment form is powered by GentleSource Comment Script. It can be included in PHP or HTML files and allows visitors to leave comments on the website.
| |||||||
- The surface breaks down organics by UV/oxidants.
- These critters are not adapted to Mars. Any indigenous life will compete them to extinction and eat them.
- Since so many unsterilized probes and chutes have already transported, what more contamination would you risk?
It's hard to estimate numbers, but the experiment masses ~ 100 g, so ~ 1 g could be cells. A bacteria masses ~ 10^-12 g, so we have ~ 10^12 cells.
A Mars chute is cleaned so that it can carry ~ 10^6 cells IIRC, I once had to do that estimate in this same context. Probes could easily carry 1000's of times that in their innards, so ~ 10^9 cells.
Sure, it would be a large point source. But an accident, assuming descent survival and release, wouldn't increase Earth bacterial load from our exploration programs more than 1-2 orders of magnitude.