{"id":2393,"date":"2011-11-10T14:17:46","date_gmt":"2011-11-10T14:17:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=2393"},"modified":"2011-11-10T14:17:46","modified_gmt":"2011-11-10T14:17:46","slug":"what-is-it-with-russia-and-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=2393","title":{"rendered":"What is it with Russia and Mars?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If at first you don&#8217;t succeed, try and try again&#8230; 18 times?<\/p>\n<p>Fobos-Grunt is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freep.com\/article\/20111110\/NEWS07\/111100445\/Russian-space-probe-stuck-orbit-causes-alarm\">stuck in low Earth orbit<\/a> and may be unsalvagable. The engines that were supposed to place it on a Mars-bound trajectory failed to start. In a few days, the probe may fall back to the Earth, raising concerns about tons of toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide fuel on board.<\/p>\n<p>My fingers are firmly crossed. This is Russia&#8217;s first attempt to launch an interplanetary spacecraft since the 1996 failure of Mars 96, and a very ambitious attempt indeed, with a planned sample return from the Mars moon Phobos. Whatever it is that went wrong, I hope they can fix it in time.<\/p>\n<p>Prior to Fobos-Grunt, Russia tried to launch a Mars probe 18 times. All were failures or partial failures, with only a few of them operating for a limited time after reaching Mars.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=2393' send='false' layout='button_count' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If at first you don&#8217;t succeed, try and try again&#8230; 18 times? Fobos-Grunt is stuck in low Earth orbit and may be unsalvagable. The engines that were supposed to place it on a Mars-bound trajectory failed to start. In a few days, the probe may fall back to the Earth, raising concerns about tons of <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=2393' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space","category-26-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2394,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2393\/revisions\/2394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}