ESA tracking station establishes contact with Russia’s Mars mission
23 November 2011
On Tuesday, 22 November at 20:25 GMT, ESA's tracking station at Perth, Australia, established contact with Russia's Phobos-Grunt spacecraft. Contact with the Mars mission was lost shortly after separation from the launch vehicle was confirmed on 8 November.
Following liftoff, the spacecraft was injected into low-Earth orbit in preparation for departure to Mars. Immediately after separation of the spacecraft and its modified Fregat stage from the launcher, controllers received signals confirming deployment of the solar panels.
Two automated burns of the Fregat engine were to have taken place beyond coverage of Russian ground stations, boosting it onto an interplanetary trajectory for the Red Planet. These failed to happen and contact was lost from that moment. However, observations showed that the craft was in a controlled attitude orbiting Earth between about 200 km and 340 km altitude.
ESA responds to Russian request for assistance
Upon request from NPO Lavochkin, operator of the mission on behalf of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, ESA agreed to do its utmost to attempt contact using the Agency’s ground station network.
Starting on 9 November, and in close coordination with Russian engineers, ESA made almost daily attempts to contact Phobos-Grunt using numerous configurations and radio link modes, but to no avail.
A major problem was that the spacecraft's orbit was not accurately known, whereas ground stations normally require very accurate position information for pointing due to the antenna size.
In the past few days, ESA's 15 m-diameter Perth dish was modified by the addition of a 'feedhorn' antenna at the side of the main dish so as to transmit very low-power signals over a wide angle in the hopes of triggering a response from the satellite.
! (Popovkin speaking, Cosmos-2474, report telemetry Now, 
