Russia plans new moon and Mars missions

Jan 19, 2012, 10:11 GMT

Moscow - Russia in planning new exploration missions to the moon and Mars, despite the recent spectacular crash of a probe that was to have traveled to the Red Planet.

'We are currently negotiating with the European Space Agency that we fly there (Mars) in the period 2016-2018,' said Vladimir Popovkin, head of Russia's national space agency Roscosmos, in an interview Thursday on the Vesti FM radio station.

Russia also intends to send two spacecraft to the moon by 2020, and may later build a manned research station there, he said.

Popovkin's comments came in the wake of Sunday's crash of Russia's Phobos-Grunt probe into the Pacific Ocean. The spaceship was designed to obtain a soil sample from the Mars moon Phobos and bring it back to Earth, but the probe's interplanetary engines failed to fire.

Roscosmos also was in talks with the US national space agency NASA on possible joint construction of a manned base on the earth satellite's surface or, alternatively, positioning an automated research station in orbit around the moon, Popovkin said.

Russian government funding for the projects, which are still in preliminary development, has not yet been allocated, he said.

The ill-fated Phobos-Grunt flight was Roscosmos' first attempted interplanetary mission in 15 years. The probe's development and launch cost some 160 million dollars.

The most likely causes of the probe's failure were outdated computer programmes and human error, Popovkin said.