What Goes Up...
by Paul McGoldrick
We are told that the Phobos-Grunt space probe, which was launched on November 9, 2011, crashed into the Pacific Ocean last Sunday, January 15. The ambitious journey of the probe was intended to grab some of the soil from Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, and bring it back to Earth. Its daring made it one of the most watched launches from Russia in decades, where failures in Mars expeditions have been the norm in the last twenty years.
The name of the probe was one of those make-you-laugh-in-English titles that we have come to expect more from Japanese t-shirts, but Фобос-Грунт, Phobos-Grunt, simply translates as Phobos-ground.
As always there was concern that the doomed mission – which failed when the probe refused to respond to commands to fire its main engines while in low-Earth orbit – would result in large pieces of the craft falling on a populated area when it dropped, which was inevitable because the power provided by its limited battery source (its solar panels were not designed to deploy until the craft was in space) could not maintain orbit. But with such a vast amount of ocean involved n our planet we once again came to no harm from the falling debris.
There was also concern expressed by the newspaper pundits that the hydrazine (N2H4) fuel on board would somehow also be a health or environmental hazard. As expected, however, it exploded under the heat effects of re-entry. (Hydrazine is basically unstable unless in solution, when it exhibits similar properties to ammonia.)
Having experienced the quality of Russian manufacturing on many occasions over the last forty years, I am not surprised by the failure of such a complex vehicle, and other space missions preceding it. My first experiences with quality in Moscow were with BNC connectors where the bayonet slots on the free plugs being handed to me on their cables were obviously machined by eye and were not 180º apart. To use all the video and RF cables provided by the (then) Soviets I had to remove one pin from all my chassis connectors! Differentiating between their 50 Ω and 75 Ω connectors, if there was any difference, was also impossible. There were many other examples over the years; fortunately, most had no safety consequence. From conversations with those who knew such things, however, the likelihood that the majority of Soviet nuclear weapons would actually operate as required was also highly questionable (although the same was true of many American ‘special weapons’ at the time).
That said, during the Soviet era and now, in the new Russia, there was a major need to protect those who had a part in manufacturing failure. The downing of Phobos-Grunt brought immediate rumors of dastardly actions by the Americans to queer the Russian efforts with stories that US radar signals overrode Russian command signals.
The stories suggest that the US was using extremely high-power radar on The Marshall Islands (WSW of the Hawaiian Islands and more like atolls) to investigate asteroids in deep space and, accidentally, killed the spacecraft with “electromagnetic emissions.”
The US denies operating such radar on the islands. And, even if they were, the idea that a radar pulse could be large enough to damage space-hardened components 200 km away is incredibly farfetched.
What has happened in response to the original story in the Kommersant Daily originated from Vladimir Popovkin, Head of the Federal Space Agency Roscosmos, is rather more incredible – and quite wonderful – for what would have been considered treason twenty years ago: two of the principal designers of the craft, Alexander Zakharov of the Russian Academy of Sciences Space Research Institute and Victor Savorsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Radio Technology and Electronics have come right out and described the story as a convenient way to blame an outside influence instead of internal quality control.
More details now seem to suggest that the whole control and command system was flawed and that there was simply not enough time with the spacecraft in radio contact with the ground, during each orbit, for the ignition system to be activated. The deep-space transmitter was even powered up as a possible link but that just drained the batteries even faster.
I have enormous respect for the engineering and science that has come out of Russia over the years. There are ego matters – such as suggesting, forcefully, that Professor Alexander Popov was the inventor of radio rather just one of the inventors alongside the likes of Marconi. Other claims include Sergei Korolev, rocket scientist and father of the first space program; Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table; Igor Sikorsky, helicopter designer; Vladimir Zworykin, inventor of the iconoscope television camera and the precursor of the crt, the kinescope. And no child should forget Samuel Born, who invented an apparatus (the Born Sucker Machine) to make lollipops. Yet many of these famous Russian inventors had to emigrate to find the opportunity.
If Born had to rely on Russian manufacturing, instead of the trained hands he found in San Francisco, would we have had lollipops or just flaking ice? It's a question worth posing in light of the demise of Phobos-Grunt. Reliance on Russian manufacturing and quality control to put astronauts on, and recover them from, the International Space Station since the mothballing of the US space shuttle program should be of major concern...before the phrase "mission-critical" takes on a completely new meaning.
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