Russia's scheduled launch of a robotic spacecraft to the Mars moon Phobos Tuesday marks the nation's first attempt at an interplanetary mission in 15 years.
The Phobos-Grunt mission is slated to blast off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome at 3:16 p.m. EST today. The main goal is to grab some dirt from Phobos' surface and return the samples to Earth in 2014 ("grunt" means "soil" in Russian).
If successful, Phobos-Grunt could shed a great deal of light on the early days of Mars and the solar system, experts say. It also would be a big morale boost for the Russian space program, which has suffered through the failure of three other Mars missions since the late 1980s.
"If Phobos-Grunt fully carries out its mission, then this will be a world-class achievement," Igor Lisov, editor-in-chief of the journal Novosti Kosmonavtiki (Space News), told Agence France-Presse. "The problem with Russian space exploration has been that people have forgotten the taste of victory. The task of this mission is to restore confidence in our abilities and the importance of the task."
If all goes according to plan, the unmanned, $163 million Phobos-Grunt mission should reach Mars by autumn 2012, then drop its lander onto Phobos a few months later. The potato-shaped moon is just 16 miles (27 kilometers) long, and most scientists think it's a former asteroid captured by Mars' gravity long ago.
The robotic lander will scrape up some Phobos soil, then launch the samples back to Earth, where they should arrive sometime in 2014. Some instruments will stay behind on the moon to carry out scientific observations.
Scientists would likely be eager to sift through the Phobos samples. Asteroids are leftovers from the solar system's early days, primordial pieces that didn't get incorporated into planets. So studying pristine chunks of an asteroid is almost like having access to a time machine, researchers have said.
Also, some of the dust collected by Phobos-Grunt could come from Mars itself, blasted off by meteorite impacts. So the mission could teach researchers about the Red Planet's early history and evolution as well.
Phobos-Grunt is also carrying several other payloads, including a capsule full of microbes prepared by the nonprofit Planetary Society in the United States to investigate how lifeforms survive and behave on long flights through deep space.
The mission is also ferrying China's first Mars probe, a small spacecraft called Yinghuo 1 that will separate from Phobos-Grunt and go into orbit around the Red Planet.