A bit of an unexpected likbez nobody asked for.
>>11463860>Phobos Grunt was a cool missionIt really wasn't, maybe the concept was but the implementation was a trainwreck. It was a failure from the start and everybody involved knew that. It was an example of how not to design space probes.
- NPO Lavochkin got a new team from scratch, not taking the previous experience with Phobos-2 into account, with both its head designer and PI complaining loudly
- NPOL was too busy with making a large batch of military satellites at the time, had very little resources left for anything else, and had to rush the Phobos-Grunt because they didn't want to miss the Mars launch window, which would have meant they fucked up
- both IKI (the scientific institute behind the mission) and NPOL made the program too ambitious, there was simply too much unproven things in the design combined together in one mission.
The awful project management was the real reason behind the failure. Due to the rush, they cut the corners too much. They used a double-redundant computer instead of triple, they used a new untested unpressurized bus named Navigator (which worked fine later in many spacecraft but had a lot of rough edges in Phobos-Grunt), they used a lot of things they only tested very little. Rumours were they rushed it so much that they haven't tested the surface operations part at all (the final approach, science mission and takeoff were designed to be autonomous since they had to work in partial comms blackout while being obstructed by Phobos). There also was a funny story with one of their interns who was dumb enough to outsource her job-related coursework to a Russian freelancing site, pic related. Which resulted in a leak of a minor CAD source, it wasn't classified but was for internal use only. The source got deleted from the net, but the story can still be found by the "P??2M-6122-0-04" keyword.
