Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: RUSSIAN PHOBOS MISSION FAILURE

by Hazed

Pity the poor Russians working in their space programme. They've just suffered yet another failure, as a planned mission to one of Mars' moons hasn't managed to leave Earth orbit.

Phobos-Grunt (Grunt means dirt or soil) launched successfully on November 9, but its engines failed to fire when it was ready to head towards Mars. It was intended to land on Phobos, collect some samples, then return to Earth in 2014. Instead, it has been circling our planet while engineers try hard to contact it and figure out why its engines didn't fire. They hope there's still a chance to get it on its way, but so far they can't get a signal to or from the spacecraft.

Russians have never had much luck with missions to Mars. Not one of the 18 previous attempts has been fully successful. By contrast, despite some losses, NASA has had 13 wholly successful missions to the red planet.

Here's an interesting article that runs down all of the failed Soviet and Russian missions launched to Mars. It was written before the Phobos-Grunt failure, so that's probably going to be one more to add to the list.

Of course, some American and European Mars missions have come to grief as well. Take a look at this infographic that shows all of the missions sent from Earth to Mars, and indicates how far they got.

It's clear that travelling to Mars is still very iffy, for unmanned ships at least. Would a ship crewed by humans have a better chance of making it, I wonder?

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