Russia To Study Martian Moons Once Again

Robbie writes "The Russian space program once faced bleak prospects, receiving meager government funding. Meanwhile, the United States and the ESA continued to send automatic probes to the Red Planet. NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers are now crawling on the planet's surface, while their Russian prototypes never lifted off and are now on display at the Space Research Institute's museum. However, the situation seems to be improving today. Under a stage-by-stage national program for studying Mars, the Phobos-Grunt automatic probe will be launched in October 2009. This cutting-edge modular spacecraft costs just 1.5 billion rubles ($64.4 million)."

Phobos Grunt = Doom guy

You know they play it in Russia too. This must be an engineer having a chuckle...

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How so? [wikipedia.org]

In the Doom novels, the main character is referred to as Flynn "Fly" Taggart, which is universally suggested to be the Doomguy from the games. However, Tom Hall's original design draft, also known as The Doom Bible, suggested his name was Buddy Dacote ("Dacote" being short for "Dies at conclusion of this episode", which is indeed the fate of the character, although he continues his adventure in the second episode). In the Doom film adaptation, the main character, John "Reaper" Grimm (played by Karl U

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How so?

Look up "grunt (noun)" on www.m-w.com

Re:Phobos Grunt = Doom guy

"Grunt" is the Russian word for "soil", not a word for "An infantry soldier. slang (orig. US)". But still, yours is an interesting thought. :-)

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Given the level of international cooperation, the guy who named the project almost certainly speaks good English and has had enough contact with Americans to pick up slang, and maybe figured the guys who signed the cheques didn't.

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They are mostly synonyms.

"Pochva" means a part of Earth's crust on which plants can grow.

"Grunt" means any soil.

PS: Russian is my native language.

Bread and circuses, minus the bread

I study minority languages of Russia and travel to many areas of the country outside the big, internationally known cities. There is desparate poverty everywhere. I'm not one of those killjoys who think you have to completely solve all human ills before launching anything into space, but it's a big mystery how Russia can come up with money for space, and yet can't seem to raise the standard of living enough to stop its demographic implosion and high rates of unemployment and deadly alcoholism. The country's priorities are so much more mixed up than the homelands of NASA or the ESA that they should seriously put this on hold.

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

I'm not one of those killjoys who think you have to completely solve all human ills before launching anything into space, but it's a big mystery how Russia can come up with money for space, and yet can't seem to raise the standard of living enough to stop its demographic implosion and high rates of unemployment and deadly alcoholism.

Because if you actually studied Economics instead of minority languages, you would understand that Russia is already overspending on its social programmes. Giving money to the poor is the best way to fuel the inflation. Plus 65M$ is a drop in a bucket compared to the current Russian currency reserves.

I am not one of those killjoys who think that poor people shouldn't be helped at all and that the markets should completely take over the welfare functions but it's a big mystery how some people fail to see the big picture even though they routinely travel through the country and are exposed to the economic processes taking care there.

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

Giving money to the poor is the best way to fuel the inflation.

You don't have to directly hand out cash to people to eradicate poverty. Governments routinely boost the economies of regions hard hit by giving tax breaks to local businesses, maintain the infrastructure they built, and spend more on education there. (Adjacent republics in Russia can have wildly different economies based on how well the schools are preparing people for a global economy, look at the difference between poor Yoshkar-Ola and increasingly affluent Cheboksary.)

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I guess what you are pointing at is the difference in the quality of management by the governors and the local legislative and executive bodies in different places.

Certainly the quality of the bureaucrats in Russia has a lot of drastic improvements to make. Still, having a decent space program does in no way interfer with the management issues that plague the Russian "glubinka". Quite to the contrary, if the youth of the country will see that the once powerful scientific industry of the country is gettin

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

Oops, to continue my last post: it seems like Russia is abandoning huge amounts of its territory in a way I've never seen in the U.S. or the EU. Things are left to rot, people pack up and move to Moscow (virtually every young minority person I know is there already or is planning to go soon) or abroad, and no local businesses ever come in. And yet, as it self-defeatingly retreats from all this space, the Asian portion of which which is ripe for China to eventually grab through force or demographics, Russia gets more nationalistic and ethnocentric of late.

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Because if you actually studied Economics instead of minority languages, you would understand that Russia is already overspending on its social programmes. Giving money to the poor is the best way to fuel the inflation.

If they can really build spacecraft to bring back frigging soil samples from a martian moon for only 60 MBucks, wouldn't economy rather dictate that other nations out-sourced their development to Russia? It might actually help their economy and total global friendship and all that. And the

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

Head hurting...how the HECK did you get off mentioning Hitler and not breaking Godwin's?

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Ha - you sed it :o)

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it's a big mystery how Russia can come up with money for space, and yet can't seem to raise the standard of living enough to stop its demographic implosion and high rates of unemployment and deadly alcoholism.

Consider India, which has been a fantastically successful exporter for centuries, and has a large middle class. It still has hundred of millions of dirt poor people.

The only reason I can think of is entrenched social inequity. It doesn't have much to do with how much you spend on space programs. It is caused by racism, prejudice and apathy. We have the same problem in Australia with our aboriginal people.

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

There is never a good time to do anything when it comes to the suffering/malignancies of humanity. If we used every problem as a reason to stop moving forward in other areas, the United States would never have put a man on the moon. Just take a look at this wiki page with references to 1969:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969 [wikipedia.org]

You have the Vietnam War, massive protests throughout the country, civil rights movements (and everything that went along with it)... etc.. The world will always be a messy place, no reason to stop making progress.

That's no moon...

...wait, my bad. It's a moon.

Re:That's no moon...

...wait, my bad. It's a moon.

Just wait until they introduce a hydrostatic equilibrum requirement for moons. When that happens, it'll be a dwarf moon. Or a Phoboid.

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You are aware that in the 1950's there was a serious proposal from the Soviet astrophysicist I.S. Shklovsky that Phobos actually was a space station ? This hypothesis attempted to explain the obital decay of the moon by atmospheric drag, which meant that it had to have such a low mass to area ratio that it basically had to be hollow.

Now the model for the orbital decay of Phobos is that it is due to tidal friction, but the spacecraft idea was seriously entertained for a while.

Wow

Now prepare for Soviet Russia jokes in 3... 2... 1...

Phobos is intriguing

Phobos never failed to intrigue me. From Wikipedia: Phobos's unusually close orbit around its parent planet produces some unusual effects. As seen from Phobos, Mars would appear 6,400 times larger and 2,500 times brighter than the full Moon appears from Earth, taking up a quarter of the width of a celestial hemisphere. Some nice pictures of Mars, including Phobos, can be found here: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/06/martian_skies.html [boston.com]

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Phobos is dynamically very interesting. Its orbit is decaying, due to its tidal interaction with Mars, and yet the tide it raises in Mars (as seen by its orbital decay) indicates a flexibility in the crust and mantle of Mars that is not in agreement with other measurements.

I wish they would go back to Venus

Basically all of our knowledge of the surface of Venus comes from the Soviet Venera [mentallandscape.com] spacecraft. The Soviets developed the ability to land spacecraft on the hellishly hot surface of Venus, conduct experiments, and send back some pretty cool pictures [mentallandscape.com].

Given that Venus is pretty similar to the Earth, except with run-away global warming, and that no other space agency has seen fit to do any surface missions, I wish that the Russians would send some more landers to Venus.

Pictures from the previous Phobos Mission

Pictures from the Soviet Phobos mission can be found here [mentallandscape.com].

Re:Moon

In Soviet Unification Church [unification.org], Moon marries you!