Phobos-Grunt Accord Reached
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By Michael A. Taverna
PARIS - French space agency CNES and the Russian Space Agency have come to an agreement that will allow CNES to receive soil samples from the Phobos-Grunt mission.
Due to lift off in October, the mission will return samples from the Martian moon Phobos, characterize the physical and chemical properties of the moon in-situ, and study ionization and solar wind effects in the Martian atmosphere.
The French agency is supplying several subsystems for the Phobos-Grunt gas analytic package, which was developed by the Moscow Institute for Space Research IKI. The subsystems are the gas chromatograph, designed by the Latmos lab for the French national science center CNRS, and the tunable diode laser spectrometer (TDLAS).
China is supplying four instruments on a Martian orbiter - Yinghuo-1 - that will be part of the mission, and the European Space Agency is providing support with its deep space radar network.
Photo of Phobos-Grunt's base section: Roscosmos
