The Russian space capsule Foton-M 4 has landed yesterday in the Orenburg region, at nearly 1,500 kilometers (almost 920 miles) south-east of Moscow, near the border with Kazakhstan. It spent about a month and a half in orbit. This small space biological laboratory contained various animals, who have gone through a quite difficult mission. Shortly after the recovery operations carried out by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, it was announced that the geckos were dead.
The Foton-M 4 spacecraft is the latest in the Foton-M series. It’s a new version of the old Vostok project, to be clear the type of capsule used by Yuri Gagarin. Nothing fancy but relatively cheap and at least in theory reliable.
The Foton program started in the ’80s to conduct scientific research in orbit, the Foton-M 4 mission was intended to conduct mainly biological research. For this reason, on July 18, 2014 the spacecraft was launched on a Soyuz-2-1a rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome with various animals including geckos, fruit flies and silkworms eggs but also plants and fungi.
On the Foton M-4 there was also an experiment to evaluate the effects of microgravity on the growth of semiconductor crystals. The purpose was to study technologies to produce higher quality crystals to use in the electronics field. This type of research is potentially useful in the production of solar cells, LEDs, transistors and other electronic applications.
The Foton-M 4 mission was difficult. It was supposed to last two months but on July 24 it was revealed that communication with the on-board computer had been lost soon after launch. A burn of the spacecraft’s thrusters to adjust its orbit was missed, with consequences to be evaluated.
On July 26, Roscosmos announced that it managed to re-establish communications with the Foton-M 4 spacecraft. However, its orbit had remained elliptical while it was originally planned to be almost perfectly circular. The use of thrusters to fix it at that point would’ve interfered too much with the experiments already started. As a result, the Russian agency had to modify the mission.
The animals on the Foton-M 4 spacecraft were supposed to provide data on their reproduction in microgravity conditions. It’s possible that the temperature dropped to levels too low for geckos but we’ll have to wait for an analysis of the recorded data to figure out what exactly happened.
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