Russian Engineers Race to Save Troubled Mars Moon Probe

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by soopaman2

Good luck to them.

Russia is the only hope for space exploration anymore, thanks to Americas incessant need to dismantle any funding that isn't foreign aid, military expediture, corporate/political cronyism.

Don't know if I'd be that cynical. Nasa successfully dispatched the one-ton rover Curiosity on it's way to Mars yesterday. I guess Congress forgot to axe that one.

Meanwhile, more grim news for Phobos-Grunt.

New European attempts to contact Phobos-Grunt fail

http://www.russianspaceweb.com/

Published: 2011 Nov. 25; updated Nov. 26

A roller coaster ride effort to contact the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft continued Friday, as Russia's stranded probe remained silent during its passes over the Australian ground station, which managed to establish first communications with the spacecraft in the previous days.

When the first opportunity of the day to downlink telemetry from Phobos-Grunt came to ESA's station in Perth nothing was heard from the spacecraft. According to ESA, the slots for communication, timed to coincide when Phobos–Grunt was passing over in direct line-of-sight with the station, began at 20:12 GMT and ran until 04:04 GMT. Each lasted just 6–8 minutes, providing very limited windows for sending commands and receiving a response.

"Our Russian colleagues provided a full set of telecommands for us to send up," Wolfgang Hell, ESA's Phobos–Grunt Service Manager was quoted on the agency's web site, "and Perth station was set to use the same techniques and configurations that worked earlier. But we observed no downlink radio signal from the spacecraft."