UPDATE: Phobos-Grunt: ESA’sLatest Orbit Raising Maneuvers Fail But More Attempts Will Be Made

Efforts to communicate with the Russian Phobos-Grunt spacecraft suffered a setback after the European Space Agency tracking antenna in Australia failed to pick up any signals after Nov. 24. Attemtps to communicate with the spacecraft on November 25/26 (UTC) have not been successful.

ESA received signals from the Russian probe for two consecutive nights before it again lost communication with the spacecraft. According to ESA, the Perth tracking station will resume communication attempts Monday, November 28 to try and re-establish contact with Phobos-Grunt.

According to the latest estimates the Phobos-Grunt proble will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere sometime in February.
Manfred Warhaut, head of operations at the European Space Agency (ESA) European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, which controls the antenna near Perth, Australia, said the favorable relative positions of the Earth to Mars now mean that the mission must be recovered immediately, or not at all.

According to space officials, orbital observations indicate that Phobos-Grunt is not tumbling and apparently holding its attitude. However, more observations are needed to provide tracking stations with information on vehicle/orbital status. Latest reports indicate that the Phobos-Grunt is in a 211 by 313 kilometer orbit around Earth.

According to ESA, it had modified its 15-meter-diameter Perth antenna with a small "horn" that would widen its transmit aperture from 2 degrees to 20 degrees to give it a better chance of finding Phobos-Grunt. It added that Phobos-Grunt's extremely low orbit takes it into solar eclipse so often that its batteries are apparently unable to sustain a charge, and this further complicates the task.

Klaus-Juergen Schulz, ESOC's head of ground station systems said ESA is acting merely as a communications node to Phobos-Grunt and is not concerned with the nature of the commands sent to the spacecraft nor the telemetry received from it.

The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, said in a Nov. 24 statement that the data received from the initial signals of the spacecraft through the ESA antenna had been passed on to NPO Lavochkin, the Phobos-Grunt prime contractor.

It has not also stated whether the information picked up by the ESA antenna in the previous two days has been of any value in understanding why Phobos-Grunt's engines did not function.

"The only realistic goal for ground controllers at the time was to receive useful information on the cause of its failure," writes Anatoly Zak of russianspaceweb.com, a Web site dedicated to cover Russian space exploration.

"If the culprit could be found and if critical systems onboard the spacecraft could be reactivated, attempts to establish some or even full control over the spacecraft would be made. Only then, it would be possible to consider what, if any, further steps could be made to continue the mission."

Zak, author of "Partners in Space" which chronicles the Russian-American cooperation in space, added that depending on the probe's remaining resources and technical condition, the options would be to send the spacecraft away from Earth for safety reasons and for testing; or send it to potential destinations in the Solar System, such as an asteroid, the Moon or even Mars, for a flyby or some other abbreviated mission.

"As a very last resort, the spacecraft could be directed into the Earth atmosphere to burn up over an unpopulated area," Zak said.