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Mission record

Yinghuo-1

Also known as Firefly

China National Space Administration · Launched

Explore trajectory

Failed · Failure

The Yinghuo-1 ("Firefly") mission is a Chinese Mars orbiter scheduled to launch in tandem with the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission in November 2011. The primary scientific objectives of the mission are to study martian space environmental structure, plasma distribution and other characteristics; the solar wind-atmosphere coupling and energy deposition processes, martian ion escape processes and mechanisms, the regional gravity field of Mars, and to perform martian and Phobos surface imaging. Yinghuo-1 was stacked on a common booster below Phobos-Grunt, and the Phobos-Grunt/Yinghuo-1 spacecraft did not perform its scheduled burn to begin its trajectory to Mars and could not leave Earth orbit.

Destinations
Launch vehicle
Zenit
Launch site
Tyuratam (Baikonur Cosmodrome), Kazakhstan
Countries
Peoples Republic of China
Mission types
Orbiter

Chronology

Mission timeline

  1. Launch

    Launched below Phobos-Grunt on a common booster

    Yinghuo-1 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, the same instant its own launch/orbital information page prints as 2011-11-08T20:16:00Z. It was stacked on a common booster below Phobos-Grunt, and is a separate mission rather than a vehicle of it: NSSDCA gives it an identifier and a record of its own, its Funding Agency is China National Space Administration (Peoples Republic of China) where Phobos-Grunt's is Unknown (Russia), and GCAT's auxcat row A07895 makes it a child of the Fobos-Grunt truss rather than of the Fobos-Grunt spacecraft.

    Earth

  2. Mission end

    Re-entered Earth's atmosphere still attached to Phobos-Grunt

    The Phobos-Grunt/Yinghuo-1 spacecraft re-entered Earth's atmosphere on 15 January 2012. Its own launch/orbital information page prints no decay date at all, so this date comes from the master catalog page; Phobos-Grunt's launch/orbital page prints the same day as Decay Date: 2012-01-15.

    Earth

Mission architecture

Vehicles

  • Yinghuo-1 · Orbiter

    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.
  • 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