Budget The cost of the project was 1.5 billion rubles (US$64.4 million). Project funding for the timeframe 2009–2012, including post-launch operations, was about 2.4 billion rubles. The total cost of the mission was to have been 5 billion rubles (US$163 million). According to lead scientist
Alexander Zakharov, the entire spacecraft and most of the instruments were new, though the designs drew upon the nation's legacy of three successful
Luna missions, which in the 1970s retrieved a few hundred grams of Moon rocks. Zakharov had described the Phobos sample return project as "possibly the most difficult interplanetary one to date". In June 2006, NPO Lavochkin announced that it had begun manufacturing and testing the development version of the spacecraft's onboard equipment. On 26 March 2007, Russia and China signed a cooperative agreement on the joint exploration of Mars, which included sending China's first interplanetary probe,
Yinghuo-1, to Mars together with the Fobos-Grunt spacecraft. Yinghuo-1 weighed and would have been released by the main spacecraft into a Mars orbit. Phobos soil sampling and downloading were developed by the GEOHI RAN Institute of the
Russian Academy of Sciences (Vernadski Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical chemistry) and the integrated scientific studies of Phobos and Mars by remote and contact methods were the responsibility of the
Russian Space Research Institute, The Chinese
Yinghuo-1 orbiter was launched together with Fobos-Grunt. In late 2012, after a 10–11.5-month cruise, Yinghuo-1 would have separated and entered an 800 × 80,000 km equatorial orbit (5° inclination) with a period of three days. The spacecraft was expected to remain on Martian orbit for one year. Yinghuo-1 would have focused mainly on the study of the external environment of Mars. Space center researchers expected to use photographs and data to study the magnetic field of Mars and the interaction between
ionospheres, escape particles and
solar wind. A second Chinese payload, the Soil Offloading and Preparation System (SOPSYS), was integrated in the lander. SOPSYS was a microgravity grinding tool developed by the
Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Another payload on Fobos-Grunt was an experiment from the
Planetary Society called
Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment; its goal was to test whether selected
organisms can survive a few years in
deep space by flying them through interplanetary space. The experiment would have tested one aspect of
transpermia, the hypothesis that life could survive space travel, if protected inside rocks blasted by impact off one planet to land on another. The
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences contributed with a radiation measurement experiment on Fobos-Grunt. Two
MetNet Mars landers developed by the
Finnish Meteorological Institute, were planned to be included as payload of the Fobos-Grunt mission, but weight constraints on the spacecraft required dropping the MetNet landers from the mission. A main reason for the delay was difficulties encountered during development of the spacecraft's onboard computers. While the Moscow-based company Tehkhom provided the computer hardware on time, the internal NPO Lavochkin team responsible for integration and software development fell behind schedule. The retirement of NPO Lavochkin's head Valeriy N. Poletskiy in January 2010 was widely seen as linked to the delay of Fobos-Grunt. Viktor Khartov was appointed the new head of the company. During the extra development time resulting from the delay, a
Polish-built drill was added to the Phobos lander as a back-up soil extraction device.
2011 launch The spacecraft arrived at
Baikonur Cosmodrome on 17 October 2011 and was transported to Site 31 for pre-launch processing. The Zenit-2SB41 launch vehicle carrying Fobos-Grunt successfully lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 20:16
UTC on 8 November 2011. The Zenit booster inserted the spacecraft into an initial elliptical
low Earth orbit with an inclination of 51.4°.
Post-launch It was expected that after 2.5 hours and 1.7 revolutions in the initial orbit, the autonomous main propulsion unit (MDU), derived from the
Fregat upper stage, would conduct its firing to insert the spacecraft into the elliptical orbit (250 km x 4150–4170 km) with a period of about 2.2 hours. After the completion of the first burn, the external fuel tank of the propulsion unit was expected to be jettisoned, with ignition for a second burn to depart Earth orbit scheduled for one orbit, or 2.1 hours, after the end of the first burn. The propulsion module constitutes the cruise-stage bus of Fobos-Grunt. According to original plans, Mars orbit arrival had been expected during September 2012 and the return vehicle was scheduled to reach Earth in August 2014. Following what would have been the planned end of the first burn, the spacecraft could not be located in the target orbit. The spacecraft was subsequently discovered to still be in its initial
parking orbit and it was determined that the burn had not taken place. Even though it had not been contacted, the spacecraft seemed to be actively adjusting its
perigee (the point it is closest to Earth in its orbit).
Contact On 22 November 2011, a signal from the probe was picked up by the
European Space Agency's tracking station in Perth,
Australia, after it had sent the probe the command to turn on one of its transmitters. The
European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in
Darmstadt,
Germany, reported that the contact was made at 20:25 UTC on 22 November 2011 after some modifications had been made to the dish facility in
Perth to improve its chances of getting a signal. No
telemetry was received in this communication. The amount of information received during this communication was not sufficient, and therefore it was not possible to identify the problem with the probe. Further communication attempts made by ESA were unsuccessful and contact was not reestablished. The space vehicle did not respond to the commands sent by the
European Space Agency to raise its orbit. Roscosmos provided these commands to ESA. ESA failed to communicate with the space probe in all of the five opportunities the agency had between 28 and 29 November 2011. During those occasions, the spacecraft did not comply with orders to fire the engines and raise its orbit. The Russian space agency then requested that ESA repeat the orders. The European Space Agency decided to end the efforts to contact the probe on 2 December 2011, with one analyst saying that Fobos-Grunt appeared "dead in the water". However, ESA made teams available to assist the Fobos-Grunt mission if there was a change in situation.
Re-entry Before reentry, the spacecraft still carried about 7.51 tonnes of highly toxic
hydrazine and
nitrogen tetroxide on board.
Aftermath Initially, the head of Roscosmos
Vladimir Popovkin, suggested that the Fobos-Grunt failure might have been the result of sabotage by a foreign nation. He also stated that risky technical decisions had been made because of limited funding. On 17 January 2012, an unidentified Russian official speculated that a U.S. radar stationed on the
Marshall Islands may have inadvertently disabled the probe, but cited no evidence. Popovkin suggested the microchips may have been counterfeit, then he announced on 1 February 2012 that a burst of
cosmic radiation may have caused computers to reboot and go into a standby mode. Industry experts cast doubt on the claim citing how unlikely the effects of such a burst are in low Earth orbit, inside the protection of
Earth's magnetic field. On 6 February 2012, the commission investigating the mishap concluded that Fobos-Grunt mission failed because of "a programming error which led to a simultaneous reboot of two working channels of an onboard computer". The craft's rocket pack never fired due to the computer reboot, leaving the craft stranded in Earth orbit. and
Boomerang for launch in 2020. Popovkin declared that they would soon attempt to repeat the Fobos-Grunt mission, if an agreement was not reached for Russian co-operation in the
European Space Agency's
ExoMars program. However, since an agreement was reached for the inclusion of Russia as a full project partner, some instruments originally developed for Fobos-Grunt were flown in the
ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. On 2 August 2014, the
Russian Academy of Sciences stated that the Phobos-Grunt repeat mission might be restarted for a launch approximately in 2024. In August 2015, the
ESA-
Roscosmos working group on post-
ExoMars cooperation, completed a joint study for a possible future Phobos sample return mission, preliminary discussions were held, and in May 2015 the Russian Academy of Sciences submitted a budget proposal. As of September 2023, Roscosmos intended to launch Boomerang "after 2030". Boomerang is intended to be the first stage of the Russian
Mars sample return mission called
Mars-Grunt. This Mars sample-return mission would be developed from the technologies demonstrated by Fobos-Grunt-2. == Objectives ==