10 Facts About Fobos-Grunt

Fobos-Grunt or Phobos-Grunt was an attempted Russian sample return mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars.

Fobos-Grunt carried the Chinese Mars orbiter Yinghuo-1 and the tiny Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment funded by the Planetary Society.

Fobos-Grunt was designed to become the first spacecraft to return a macroscopic sample from an extraterrestrial body since Luna 24 in 1976.

Fobos-Grunt project began in 1999, when the Russian Space Research Institute and NPO Lavochkin, the main developer of Soviet and Russian interplanetary probes, initiated a 9 million rouble feasibility study into a Phobos sample-return mission.

Fobos-Grunt was now made one of the program's flagship missions.

Related searches

The Zenit-2SB41 launch vehicle carrying Fobos-Grunt successfully lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 20:16 UTC on 8 November 2011.

However, ESA made teams available to assist the Fobos-Grunt mission if there was a change in situation.

Russian military sources claimed that Fobos-Grunt was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and South America when it re-entered the atmosphere at about 17:45 UTC.

Fobos-Grunt stated that risky technical decisions had been made because of limited funding.

On 6 February 2012, the commission investigating the mishap concluded that Fobos-Grunt mission failed because of "a programming error which led to a simultaneous reboot of two working channels of an onboard computer".