Russia ready to launch probe to Martian moon

Nature : After some 15 years, Russia is attempting to reignite its space program with the 8 November launch of its Phobos-Grunt spacecraft. The mission is two-pronged: to carry out scientific measurements on the surface of Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons, and to bring back to Earth a few hundred grams of pebbles and dust collected from the moon’s surface. From the soil sample, scientists hope they will also find particles of material from Mars that they think could have been ejected from the planet’s surface by asteroid bombardment some 4 billion years ago. They also hope to use the material to determine Phobos’s age and origin and to see whether it contains any organic matter. “The major outcome is that Russia might establish its credibility again,” said Roald Sagdeev, a former director of the Space Research Institute in Moscow who is now at the University of Maryland in College Park.