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)."

Comments

Phobos Grunt = Doom guy

[damburger]

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

Bread and circuses, minus the bread

[CRCulver]

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

[mahmud]

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

[CRCulver]

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.)

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

[mahmud]

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 getting up on its feet again, they will be more eager to join the engineering courses, and other scientific studies that have lost a lot of their glitter and prestige during the wild 90's.

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

[TheJasper]

I'm not one of those killjoys who think you have to completely solve all human ills before launching anything into space,

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 .

I study neither economics nor minority languages. It seems to me however that quite a bit of corruption has a negative effect on both capitalistic and socialistic programs.
A prestige project is good for national morale and could help the country as a whole. At 65M$ (10â approx) it isn't all that expensive. Of course the whole program costs more.
Keeping it in perspective, the russian gdp is 1.3 trillion $, the budget is 299 billion$ in, 265 billion$ out. Meaning about 24 billion $ is surplus. 65M$ is negligble.

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

[antirelic]

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

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.

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

[Notquitecajun]

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

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

[aproposofwhat]

Ha - you sed it :o)

Re:Bread and circuses, minus the bread

[infolib]

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 budget of {NA|E}SA.

That's no moon...

[oodaloop]

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

Re:That's no moon...

[Ihlosi]

...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.

Re:That's no moon...

[mbone]

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.

Re:Phobos Grunt = Doom guy

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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

Re:Wow

[TheJasper]

In Soviet Russia the jokes prepare for you.

happy now?

Re:Moon

[smittyoneeach]

In Soviet Unification Church, Moon marries you!

Phobos is intriguing

[denver38]

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

Re:Phobos is intriguing

[mbone]

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

[mbone]

Basically all of our knowledge of the surface of Venus comes from the Soviet Venera 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.

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

[mbone]

Pictures from the Soviet Phobos mission can be found here.

First ever probe to return to earth from Mars?

[anilg]

Looks like this mission is the first ever in the world with plans to return back to earth from Mars(or its moons). And for under 100 mill$, its a bargain.

Best of luck to the P-G team.

Re:Phobos Grunt = Doom guy

[Cyberax]

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.