ESA Ends Attempts To Pick Up Phobos-Grunt Signals 40
Spaceflight Now reports that hope has faded in the attempts to hear from the troubled Phobos-Grunt probe, and the listening project has been shuttered. After the craft's launch, says the article, "ESA continued trying to establish communications this week with tracking stations in Australia and the Canary Islands, but the 29,000-pound Phobos-Grunt spacecraft never responded. ... The agency's communications site in Perth, Australia, contacted Phobos-Grunt at least twice Nov. 22 and Nov. 23, but the probe has remained mysteriously silent since then." (Similar coverage also at the BBC.) See RussianSpaceWeb.com for a more detailed timeline.
Re:Refusal by United States to help? (Score:5, Informative)
Please see official answer to this from NASA:
http://www.marstravel.org/2011/11/response-from-nasa-regarding-assistance.html [marstravel.org]
Re:QC vs FSB (Score:4, Informative)
When the tests of the flight sequence finally started, the flight control system reportedly was not able to score a single clean run of its entire flight program without experiencing some sort of problems.
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/phobos_grunt_2011.html#bku [russianspaceweb.com]
So onboard computer which controls the flight basically did not pass any pre-flight test. "Let's try, if it fails also in real, not only during testing..."