Target Phobos
In Flipside 32 we take a close-up look at Mars’s largest moon. A space probe is going there next year – find out how it’s going to do it…
 Phobos represents an enticing target for space scientists because it may well allow them to study two sections of the solar system at the same time. Its lumpy shape and dark appearance suggest it is a gravity-captured asteroid, originating in the asteroid belt beyond Mars. At the same time its close orbit and distinctive chains of craters suggest that a lot of rocks from the Martian surface have been propelled up there by past meteorite impacts.
The hope is that material from many different periods in the Red Planet’s history has ended up strewn across the surface of Phobos, perhaps including some rocks from its warm, wet first billion years – the time when Mars was most likely to have harboured life.
 Next year begins an effort to retrieve samples from Phobos and return them back to Earth. The Russian-and Chinese-backed mission to do it is called Phobos-Grunt, and it is due for launch in October 2009. Crazy name, crazy space probe? Actually ‘grunt’ is Russian for soil. The plan, after 10 months of interplanetary travel, is for the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft to carry out remote analysis of the moon’s surface with an automated laboratory, but also to collect soil for a return to Earth by 2012. The spacecraft will also map the make-up of the moon and study its surrounding dust and plasma.
The 8210-kg Phobos-Grunt spacecraft will also be transporting a Chinese probe called Yinghuo-1 which will go into orbit around Mars, and Finnish-built weather stations will be landed on the Martian surface.
Will it work? Russia has previous history with Mars and Phobos exploration, none of it very promising. In 1988 and 1989 the old Soviet Union aimed two landers at Phobos, but both of them failed en route. Then in 1996 a Russian spacecraft called Mars 96 - its design based on the Phobos spacecraft – was launched to Mars, but never made it beyond Earth orbit, coming down to land in the South American Andes. This new mission will be Russia’s first attempt since to reach interplanetary space. If it does succeed, expect international interest in both the Red Planet and its moons to increase – maybe even a 1960s-style Mars Race?
|
