Official News page 4

REAL LIFE NEWS: PHOBOS-GRUNT SPEAKS!

by Hazed

Speaking of missions to Mars, there's good news: the Phobos-Grunt probe has finally responded to signals, and the European Space Agency has manged to get telemetry data from the ailing craft. But the bad news is that the info is gibberish.

The ESA received a signal from the craft on Tuesday, and then made three attempts to communicate. One of the tries was successful, but unfortunately, the experts can't understand it.

One report said that the reason is that they cannot decrypt it - the probe's default setting is to send its data in encrypted form, which seems a very bizarre design decision if true. But other reports say that the message was just incomplete and garbled.

Either way, things aren't looking good for Phobos-Grunt. The Russians don't know why its engines failed to fire, and now it's too late to send in to Mars even if they can get back in contact with it.

The only hope is to repurpose the ship and send it to the Moon, or for a landing on a near-Earth asteroid. So fingers crossed that the poor lost probe stops talking gibberish soon.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/23/phobos_grunt_contact/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/24/phobos_grunt_telemetry_encoded/

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page