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Mission record

Phobos-Grunt

Also known as Fobos-Grunt

Russia · Launched

Explore trajectory

Failed · Failure

Phobos-Grunt (alternatively Fobos-Grunt) was a Russian mission designed to land on the martian moon Phobos and return a sample to Earth. The primary scientific objective was to analyze the sample on Earth to understand the origin and reconstruct the history of Phobos. It was launched with a Chinese Mars orbiter mission, Yinghuo-1. The spacecraft did not perform its scheduled burn to begin its trajectory to Mars and could not leave Earth orbit. It re-entered Earth's atmosphere on 15 January 2012.

Destinations
Launch vehicle
Zenit
Launch site
Tyuratam (Baikonur Cosmodrome), Kazakhstan
Countries
Russia
Mission types
Sample return, Lander

Chronology

Mission timeline

  1. Launch

    Launched into an elliptical Earth orbit it never left

    Phobos-Grunt launched on 8 November 2011 at 2016 UT on a Zenit 2SB41.1 rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan into an elliptical Earth orbit, and the launch/orbital information page gives the same instant as 2011-11-08T20:16:00Z. The plan was to use a Fregat upper stage to carry Phobos-Grunt and Yinghuo-1 on an eleven month cruise to Mars. However, the later firings never occured and the spacecraft remained in Earth orbit. The committed launch vehicle is the Facts in Brief value Zenit; the fuller Zenit 2SB41.1 the page's own text prints is recorded here. The agency and country both come from Funding Agency Unknown (Russia), which is the only attribution any page cited here prints.

    Earth

  2. Milestone

    ESA reported renewed recovery attempts

    ESA reported unsuccessful attempts through Maspalomas earlier that week and agreed to continue through December 9. This original report supersedes an unqualified December 2 final-stop date in the later history.

    Earth

  3. Milestone

    Mission declared lost

    ESA reports that Roscosmos declared the spacecraft lost on December 13. It remained in Earth orbit until reentry; Yinghuo-1, MDU, the return vehicle and capsule did not perform their planned independent Mars operations.

    Earth

  4. Mission end

    Re-entered Earth's atmosphere two months after launch

    It reentered the atmosphere on 15 January, 2012, which the launch/orbital information page prints as Decay Date: 2012-01-15. GCAT's satcat row S37872 gives the same spacecraft a Dest of 46S 87W, which is a fall location rather than a destination.

    Earth

Mission architecture

Vehicles

  • Phobos-Grunt · Lander

    Destinations: Mars

    • Phobos-Grunt return vehicle (VA) · Spacecraft

      Destinations: Earth

      • Fobos-Grunt SA · Return capsule

    • Phobos-Grunt main propulsion unit (MDU) · Other

      Destinations: Mars

Trajectory record

Trajectory dataset not yet available

Known dates and encounters do not uniquely determine a flight path. This mission’s sourced timeline is available above; no verified trajectory is currently published here.

What is needed to reconstruct this path?
  • A frame-qualified position and vector velocity at an epoch, or equivalent complete orbital elements.
  • Separate state histories and release epochs for the listed vehicles; a parent mission trajectory cannot be assigned to every component.
  • Finer event-time constraints where required by an orbital reconstruction; the stored day/month/year precision is retained.
  • The actual failed-flight state history. Intended destinations are not evidence that the spacecraft reached them.

Provenance

Sources

Each source is listed once and labeled with the mission, event, trajectory, or destination/body context it supports.

Data verified through September 14, 2026