Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Upcoming Russian Space Probes

2009 Phobos Grunt: sample return from Phobos. Grunt means soil in this case. Carries a Chinese Martian orbiter with it.

2012 Luna-GLOB: lunar orbiter. Also drops penetrators into the moon.

Luna-Resource: rover near the poles. I guess for 2012?

2016 Venera-D: Venus orbiter, balloons, and a lander. hmmm.

MarsNet: With *FINLAND* (Finns in spppppaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace). Sorry. Finns are building penetrators for Mars.

Let's see how much of this materializes rather than lives merely on PowerPoint. A lot of this is very ambitious. Perhaps more so than the Russians can really do. OTOH, the US didn't have a track record for a long time before going out exploring again in the mid to late 1990s. We'll see. However, the Europeans, Americans and Japanese at least have cross fertilization of their space probe programs, does Russia have that sort of interaction with the rest? Honestly don't know...

Hattip to Future Planetary Exploration.

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