of Sciences contributed with a radiation measurement experiment on Fobos-Grunt. Two MetNet Mars landers developed by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, were planned to be included as payload of the Fobos-Grunt mission, but weight constraints on the spacecraft required dropping the MetNet landers from the mission. Postponed 2009 launch The October 2009 launch date could not be achieved due to delays in the spacecraft development. During 2009, officials admitted that the schedule was very tight, but still hoped until the last moment that a launch could be made. On 21 September 2009, the mission was officially announced to be delayed until the next launch window in 2011. A main reason for the delay was difficulties encountered during development of the spacecraft's onboard computers. While the Moscow-based company Tehkhom provided the computer hardware on time, the internal NPO Lavochkin team responsible for integration and software development fell behind schedule. The retirement of NPO Lavochkin's head Valeriy N. Poletskiy in January 2010 was widely seen as linked to the delay of Fobos-Grunt. Viktor Khartov was appointed the new head of the company. During the extra development time resulting from the delay, a Polish-built drill was added to the Phobos lander as a back-up soil extraction device. 2011 launch The spacecraft arrived at Baikonur Cosmodrome on 17 October 2011 and was transported to Site 31 for pre-launch processing. The Zenit-2SB41 launch vehicle carrying Fobos-Grunt successfully lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 20:16 UTC on 8 November 2011. The Zenit booster inserted the spacecraft into an initial elliptical low Earth orbit with an inclination of 51.4°. Two firings of the main propulsion unit in Earth orbit were required to send the spacecraft onto the interplanetary trajectory. Since both engine ignitions would have taken place outside the range of Russian ground stations, the project participants asked volunteers around the world to take optical observations of the burns, e.g. with telescopes, and report the results to enable more accurate prediction of the mission flight path upon entry into the range of Russian ground stations. Post-launch It was expected that after 2.5 hours and 1.7 revolutions in the initial orbit, the autonomous main propulsion unit (MDU), derived from the Fregat upper stage, would conduct its firing to insert the spacecraft into the elliptical orbit (250 km x 4150–4170 km) with a period of about 2.2 hours. After the completion of the first burn, the external fuel tank of