Alexander Valentinovich Zakharov (russian: link=no, Алекса́ндр Валенти́нович Заха́ров, born June 1, 1941) is a
Soviet
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...
and Russian chief scientist and astronomer serving at the
Russian Space Research Institute
The Russian Space Research Institute (russian: Институт космических исследований Российской академии наук, Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, SRI RAS, Russian abbreviat ...
(IKI).
He was a lead scientist of the failed Mars missions,
Mars 96 and
Fobos-Grunt.
Biography
Three days after the end of ''Mars 96'', Zakharov came up to the conclusion that there was a flaw in the spacecraft control system, and proposed another attempt for another Mars mission.
In 1999, he became a project scientist on the feasibility of the
Fobos-Grunt sample return mission.
In November 2007, he was interviewed by
Mat Kaplan
Mat Kaplan is an American radio personality. He is the former host of ''Planetary Radio'', a radio talk show about space exploration produced by The Planetary Society.
Career
Kaplan's extensive background in journalism has ranged from public ...
on ''Planetary Radio'' along with Bruce Betts and Tom Duxbury.
In 2008, he became a member of
The Planetary Society's
Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment team. He was responsible for placing the LIFE biomodule into the return capsule.
He forwarded the letter about the Fobos-Grunt failure to the Planetary Society members. After the probe's fall into the southern
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...
on January 15, 2012, he commented that this crash was a tragedy for the Russian scientific community, and that with soil samples from Phobos his team could uncover information about the solar system's origins. Later, he told
Reuters
Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world.
The agency was estab ...
about the possible reasons of the probe stranded in low Earth orbit, but doesn't rule out something. He then suggested there was some kind of problem with the flight system or the programming, which were not designed to guard against the space radiation.
He was hoping that Fobos-Grunt will be repeated as called by IKI's director
Lev Zeleny and later acknowledged by Roscosmos in April 2012. However, with an agreement for cooperation with the
European Space Agency
, owners =
, headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France
, coordinates =
, spaceport = Guiana Space Centre
, seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png
, seal_size = 130px
, image = Views in the Main Control Room (1205 ...
on
ExoMars had been reached, the space agency chose to focus on that program instead, but not ruled out any possible future Phobos sample return mission.
Zakharov will be attending the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society AGU (WPGM) Joint Assembly from 13 to 17 August 2012 at
Resorts World Sentosa
Resorts World Sentosa (abbreviation: RWS) is an integrated resort
An integrated resort (IR) is a major resort property that includes a hotel with a casino, together with convention facilities, entertainment shows, theme parks, luxury r ...
,
Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...
for the presentation on Mars Science and Exploration.
Bibliography
*
References
External links
Russian Space Research Institute
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zakharov, Alexander V.
1941 births
Living people
Scientists from Moscow
Russian astronomers
Soviet astronomers