Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made it clear over the weekend that he wants to punish those responsible for the likely failure of Phobos-Grunt.   Anatoly Zak at RussianSpaceWeb.com reports that “the latest round of purges” at Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, “was expected to start as soon as Monday, November 28.”

Zak, a widely respected Russian space analyst who lives in the United States, is highly critical of Medvedev’s comments:  “With his trivialization of Stalin’s crimes in a pre-election political theater, Medvedev played a dangerous game of appeasing those who saw the unspeakable terror of the Soviet past as a viable future for Russia…. In the 1930s, Stalin’s henchmen nearly decimated the nascent Soviet rocket development program, along with the rest of the Soviet society. Leaders of the Rocket Research Institute, RNII, were murdered and the organization’s leading engineers, Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, lost years of their lives in prisons.” 

The current head of Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, has been on the job only a few months.  A retired Army general, he replaced Gen. Anatoly Perminov who was forced into retirement in April after a December 2010 Proton launch failure that doomed three GLONASS navigation satellites.  The GLONASS system, similar to the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS), is a top priority at the highest levels of the Russian government and it would have gotten back up to full operational capability — 24 operational satellites — with that launch.   That milestone was ultimately achieved last month.  The Russians want to have 30 operational satellites on orbit, and another was launched today.

Russia has suffered a series of embarrassing rocket failures in the past year and some wonder if that reflects deeper problems in the Russian aerospace industry.  In a speech to the Russian State Duma (its lower house of Parliament) in October, Popovkin reportedly acknowledged a “deep rooted crisis” caused by “outdated regulations,” “fixed asset depreciation,” a “technology gap,” and an aging aerospace workforce.  He added that he planned to make major changes at Khrunichev, which manufactures Proton and other Russian launch vehicles.

Khrunichev did not build either Phobos-Grunt or the Fregat upper stage that apparently malfunctioned, however.  Both are built by NPO Lavochkin, which undoubtedly is under scrutiny for this latest failure.  Hopes have dimmed that the spacecraft can be rescued.

RussianSpaceWeb.com reports that the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) most recent efforts (November 25 Eastern Standard Time, November 26 in Australia) to communicate with Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft were not successful.  ESA’s space operations website has not yet been updated with those results. 

Using its ground station in Perth, Australia, ESA was able to communicate with the spacecraft twice earlier in the week, but that success has not been repeated.  Phobos-Grunt was launched on a Zenit rocket plus a Fregat upper stage on November 8.  The Zenit appears to have worked perfectly, but the Fregat did not fire to place the spacecraft onto its Mars trajectory and the spacecraft remains stranded in Earth orbit.  The cause is not known.

Reuters quotes Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as saying that he believes those responsible for recent space program failures, like Phobos-Grunt, should be punished.  The Reuters quote is as follows: 

“‘Recent failures are a strong blow to our competitiveness. It does not mean that something fatal has happened, it means that we need to carry out a detailed review and punish those guilty, Medvedev told reporters in televised comments.

“‘I am not suggesting putting them up against the wall like under Josef Vissarionovich (Stalin), but seriously punish either financially or, if the fault is obvious, it could be a disciplinary or even criminal punishment,’ he said.”

ESA needs to use its Perth ground station for its own spacecraft for the next couple of days as it works through a backlog of tasks that were set aside.  It then plans to resume attempts to contact Phobos-Grunt.  ESA and Russia have cooperated together on Mars missions for many years.  Russia launched ESA’s Mars Express probe, which successfully entered orbit around Mars in 2003.

Editor’s note:  Thanks to Jeff Foust for bringing the Reuters article to our attention via Twitter.

As many of us enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, the European Space Agency (ESA) continued its attempts to communicate with Russia’s Phobos-Grunt (Phobos-soil) spacecraft.   Today ESA reported that they were not successful.

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UPDATE 2:  Anatoly Zak at RussianSpaceWeb.com quotes Russian space news source Novosti Kosmonavtiki as saying that ESA received telemetry from Phobos-Grunt on the spacecraft’s most recent pass over ESA’s ground station in Australia and it has been sent to Phobos-Grunt spacecraft manufacturer NPO Lavochkin for analysis.  The pass was from 20:21-20:28 GMT (3:21-3:28 pm EST).  Next pass is 21:53-22:03 GMT (4:53-5:03 pm EST.)

UPDATE:  ESA has 

UPDATE:  ESA has provided some of the detail on how they succeeded in contacting Phobos-Grunt and when the next opportunity is expected.

ORIGINAL STORY:  The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that it established contact with Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft that has been stranded in Earth orbit since launch on November 8.

The ESA announcement is as follows:

23 November 2011

On Tuesday, 22 November at 20:25 UT, ESA’s tracking station at Perth, Australia, established contact with Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft. The contact with the Mars mission was lost shortly after launch on 8 November. ESA teams are working closely with engineers in Russia to determine how best to maintain communication with the spacecraft. More news will follow later.

Phobos-Grunt is designed to collect a sample of Mars’s moon Phobos and return it to Earth.  According to various officials, the launch window for the spacecraft to make that two-way trip closed on Monday, but a one-way trip would still be possible.  The spacecraft also carries a small Chinese spacecraft intended to orbit Mars and an experiment from The Planetary Society.

More news as it becomes available.

UPDATE:   ESA reports today (Thursday, Nov. 24) that it was successful in communicating with Phobos-Grunt on the first of five passes late yesterday (EST), but was not successful during the subsequent four passes.  It had not expected communications during the second pass, but apparently had expected to hear from the stranded spacecraft on the later attempts.   ESA said that the later attempts used a different antenna on the spacecraft and Russian experts are troubleshooting the situation to ascertain whether that antenna is the problem.  The ESA statement said another five opportunities are available during the night of November 24-25, but it did not indicate which time zone that refers to (GMT, Central European Standard Time, Moscow Time, or the time in Perth, Australia where ESA’s tracking station is located.)

ORIGINAL STORY:  It is far too early to pop champagne corks, but the establishment of initial communications with the Russian Phobos-Grunt spacecraft certainly is good news that raises the question of what’s next for the stranded spacecraft.

Russia’s RIA Novosti confirmed reports on Twitter by RussianSpaceWeb.com and others that the European Space Agency (ESA) was able to obtain telemetry from the spacecraft today (Eastern Standard Time).   An ESA ground station in Perth, Australia, picked up a carrier signal from the spacecraft yesterday.  Today’s brief communications section obtained telemetry that is being analyzed by Russian experts at NPO Lavochkin, which manufactured the spacecraft.

Phobos-Grunt  (Phobos-soil) was stranded in a very low Earth orbit after its Fregat upper stage failed to place it on a trajectory to Mars following an otherwise successful launch on November 8.  A signal was received that the solar panels deployed, but the spacecraft went silent thereafter.   Attempts to raise the spacecraft were futile until ESA received the carrier signal yesterday.  In its low orbit, communicating with it is possible only for brief periods (6-10 minutes) each time it passes over specially equipped ground stations.  The ESA ground station in Perth was modifiedto raise the chances of establishing communication.

RussianSpaceWeb.com quotes a Russian space news website, Novosti Kosmonavtiki, as stating that the telemetry indicated the power supply and communications equipment were normal; more details await analysis by Lavochkin.

If Russian experts are able to determine what went wrong with the Fregat upper stage and remedy the problem, the question is what to do with the spacecraft.  It was designed to obtain a sample of Mars’s moon Phobos and return it to Earth.   Officials report that the window for a two-way trip to Mars closed on Monday, but a one-way trip to Mars could still be possible.  Phobos-Grunt carries a small Chinese Mars orbiter that could be deployed even if the primary mission had to be abandoned.  The one-way launch window to Mars remains open for several more weeks.   NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity is scheduled for launch on Saturday, for example; its launch window is open until mid-December.  Earth and Mars are properly aligned in their orbits every 26 months for trips between the two planets.

Suggestions have been made that the spacecraft could be used for lunar research instead.   RIA Novosti quotes the deputy head of Russia’s Institute for Space Research as suggesting that Phobos-Grunt could be sent to an asteroid rather than the Moon, since Phobos is similar to an asteroid and the scientific equipment would be better suited for such a mission.

All of that assumes that the spacecraft can be “reanimated” in RIA Novosti’s terminology.  Whether or not that is in the cards will not be known until Lavochkin analyzes the telemetry, but at the very least engineers may be able to determine what went wrong.  Russia’s attempts to send its own probes to Mars have been plagued with failure since the 1960s although it successfully launched ESA’s Mars Express in 2003.

China’s Shenzhou-8 spacecraft returned to Earth today (November 17, 2011) after successfully completing two dockings with the Tiangong-1 space station module. Neither craft had a crew.

Bob Christy’s Zarya.info website shows the landing site as near 42.1 degrees North, 101.1 degrees East in the primary landing zone in China. The landing time was 11:32:16 GMT (06:32:16 EST).

Shenzhou 8 was launched on October 31 EDT (November 1 local time in China). The first docking occurred two days later, creating China’s first space station, albeit unoccupied. Shenzhou 8 later undocked and redocked with Tiangong-1 (Heavenly Palace).

Chinese authorities say that two more Shenzhou spacecraft will be sent to Tiangong-1 during the next two years. At least one of them will have a crew aboard.

Correction:  An earlier version of this article said that Shenzhou 8 was launched on October 31 EST, or Eastern Standard Time, but it was Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).  This version of the article also clarifies that “today” refers to November 17, 2011, the day that Shenzhou 8 returned to Earth, by which time the United States had changed to Standard Time and thus EST is correct in that case.

It is rare in Washington for critics of actions by individual government employees to name names in congressional hearings, but today was an exception. At a House subcommittee hearing on the future of NASA’s planetary science program, Cornell University’s Steve Squyres identified Sally Ericsson at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as the person holding up robotic Mars exploration plans with Europe.

Squyres chaired the recent National Research Council (NRC) Decadal Survey on planetary science that identified the top science questions in planetary research for the next 10 years (a decade) and prioritized programs to answer them. Ericsson is the Program Associate Director (PAD) for Natural Resources Programs at OMB, which includes the Science and Space Branch that oversees NASA. According to the committee’s public witness list, she was invited to testify at the hearing. Subcommittee chairman Steve Palazzo (R-MS) stated at the outset of the hearing, however, that OMB declined to participate.

The hearing by the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee focused on plans for future robotic exploration of Mars. In 2009, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) signed an agreement essentially merging their robotic Mars programs. Under that plan, missions are supposed to be launched in 2016 and 2018 as the first steps in returning samples from the surface of Mars. Many scientists believe that robotic sample return missions are a necessary prerequisite to sending humans there someday.

Russia launched a robotic mission last week to return samples of Mars’s moon Phobos, but returning them from the surface of Mars is an even more difficult undertaking. The Russian probe, Phobos-Grunt, is stranded in Earth orbit for unknown reasons, but Russian space experts have not given up on reviving it and sending it on its way.

NASA is about to launch the next of its Mars probes, Curiosity, on the day after Thanksgiving. For the future, NASA and ESA decided to merge their programs, jointly sending orbiters and landers to Mars over a period of years. First would be an orbiter launched in 2016 to study Mars’s atmosphere and serve as a communications link for a lander to be launched in 2018. The 2018 lander would rove across Mars’s surface, select samples, and place them in a container (“cache” them) for return to Earth by subsequent spacecraft.

Uncertainty about funding for NASA’s planetary exploration program is jeopardizing those plans, however. At the hearing, Squyres congratulated NASA for following the recommendations of the Decadal Survey and finding ways to reduce costs. Even though budget projections for NASA’s planetary science program have been sharply reduced in the past year, Squyres asserted that the descoped plan fits within the revised budgets. Squyres is the principal investigator for the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. He also was recently selected as the new chair of the NASA Advisory Council.

The issue, he said, was that OMB is not willing to make a commitment to the NASA-ESA plan. NASA’s Jim Green, Director of the Planetary Science Division (PSD) in the Science Mission Directorate, agreed that the problem was unwillingness in the Administration to make that commitment. In addition to the overall challenges in today’s budget environment, PSD also is expected to have to pay for some of the cost overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) honed in on the JWST issue during questioning. Noting that the cost of JWST rose from $1.8 billion to $8.8 billion, he castigated cost overruns at NASA as being a significant cause of the belt tightening now underway. He also criticized the Space Launch System (SLS) and suggested that it, too, likely would encounter cost overruns and is not needed.

Conferees on the FY2012 appropriations bill that includes NASA increased funding for JWST to pay for overruns and enable the mission to be launched in 2018 instead of years later. For FY 2012 alone, the increase is $156 million above the $374 million request. Another $1.067 billion above what was planned last year will be needed for FY2013-2016. Those increases will have to be absorbed by the agency. NASA officials have been saying that they want half of the $156 million in FY2012 to come from other parts of SMD and half from NASA’s institutional programs in the Cross Agency Support account. Earth science is exempted, however, so the half that must come from SMD would be split among other astrophysics programs, heliophysics and planetary science. That makes the funding outlook for planetary science even more constrained. The source of funds for the additional $1.067 billion in future years has not been revealed.

The thrust of the hearing, however, was not the actual budget numbers, but the reluctance of the Obama administration to commit to the overall joint robotic Mars exploration program with ESA. Green explained that it is OMB’s responsibility to weigh priorities across the government and it would not release its decision until the FY2013 budget request is submitted next February. Until then, Green said, NASA is proceeding on the basis of the 2009 agreement to plan the missions with ESA despite the lack of commitment on the part of the White House. Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD) called OMB’s action “a serious cause for concern” and said the subcommittee needed to hear from OMB about “why the joint program is being stalled.”

• Hearing Charter
• Opening statement of Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS)
• Opening statement of Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD)
• Written statement of Jim Green, Director, Planetary Science Division, NASA
• Written statement of Steve Squyres, chair of the NRC Decadal Survey on planetary science and professor, Cornell University
• Webcast

Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, finally has a statement on its website about the Phobos-Grunt situation.

Based on translations using Yahoo! Bable Fish and Google Translate, Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin confirms that they have not been able to communicate with the spacecraft, which has been stranded in Earth orbit since its launch on Tuesday. A retired Army general, Popovkin took over the agency earlier this year.

Popovkin’s comments appear to be the first official public statement from Roscosmos about the fate of the spacecraft. In the interim, a number of unnamed sources have been quoted in the Russian media about how long they have to revive the spacecraft before it misses the window to go to Mars or reenters Earth’s atmosphere. Earlier reports stated that the Mars window closes on November 21, but Popovkin said they have until early December. As for when it would reenter the atmosphere, earlier assessments ranged from late November to early December, but Popovkin said January.

He played down the risk of damage if the probe reenters. Others point out that the spacecraft carries a substantial amount of toxic fuel for its journey to Mars and return to Earth of a sample of Mars’s moon Phobos. Popovkin expressed confidence, however, that the spacecraft would burn up (“explode”) during reentry. That statement does not seem to take into account, however, that the sample return portion of the probe was specifically designed to survive reentry.

In addition to its main mission of returning a sample of Phobos, the spacecraft also includes a small Chinese Mars orbiter — China’s first deep space probe — and an experiment from The Planetary Society containing Earth organisms that were to make the journey to Phobos and back.

UPDATE 5: Soyuz TMA-22 successfully docked with the ISS at 12:24 am EST November 16.

UPDATE 4: Soyuz TMA-22 is in orbit.

UPDATE 3: Snow notwithstanding, Soyuz TMA-22 lifts off on time at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

UPDATE 2: Ten minutes to liftoff.

UPDATE: The gantry has been retracted in preparation for launch.

ORIGINAL STORY: The next International Space Station (ISS) crew is awaiting launch at 11:14 tonight EST (Monday morning local time at the launch site) amidst a snowstorm.

Two Russians and an American are aboard the Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft. The three are Anatoly Ivanishin, Anton Shkaplerov and Dan Burbank. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will dock with ISS just after midnight on Wednesday EST.

NASA is covering the launch live on NASA TV.

The old saying that no news is good news certainly does not apply in the case of Russia’s Phobos-Grunt Mars mission. Russian experts still have not been able to communicate with the spacecraft, stranded in Earth orbit since Tuesday. Meanwhile, NASA is preparing to launch its next Mars probe, Curiosity, on the day after Thanksgiving.

Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, is as silent about the situation as the spacecraft itself. Though the Russian language version of its website continues to be updated regarding other Russian space missions, nothing has been posted about Phobos-Grunt. Tomorrow’s scheduled launch of Soyuz TMA-22 to the International Space Station dominates the Roscosmos site. The link to the Phobos-Grunt mission clearly is to material posted prior to the launch. (A note on the English language version of the site has stated for some time that it will not be updated until November 30 for unexplained reasons.)

Russia’s main news agency, Itar-Tass, carried a story yesterday, but it was a summnary of what other Russian media sources were reporting, not its own story.

Today, Ria Novosti reports that continued attempts to communicate with the spacecraft failed again overnight and this morning. That report cites an unnamed source as saying that November 21 is the cutoff date for efforts to resolve whatever problem has beset Phobos-Grunt and send it on its way to Mars. Emily Lakdawalla, blogging for The Planetary Society, which has an experiment on the spacecraft, explains that November 21 is when the launch window to Mars closes. Earth and Mars are correctly aligned to enable launches only every 26 months. Although Russian experts estimate that Phobos-Grunt will reenter Earth’s atmosphere around December 3 if contact cannot be restored, there is less time available in order to send it on its journey.

Meanwhile, NASA is getting ready to launch its next Mars spacecraft on November 25, the day after Thanksgiving. Like Phobos-Grunt, the NASA spacecraft, named Curiosity or the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), is a technically risky mission with rich scientific potential. Russia’s history of Mars probes has been jinxed since it began in the 1960s, and although NASA has suffered several high profile failures (Mariner 8, Mars Observer, Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander), it also has stunning successes, including the twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. The new spacecraft, Curiosity, will use a new, challenging landing method — a “sky crane” — that will undoubtedly have scientists and engineers on the edge of their seats next year when the spacecraft reaches its destination.

For the next week or so, however, attention will continue to focus on Russia’s Mars mission, Phobos-Grunt, and whether miracles can still happen.