financing of the Russian space program. This changed in the summer of 2005, when the new government plan for space activities in 2006–2015 was published. Fobos-Grunt was now made one of the program's flagship missions. With substantially improved funding, the launch date was set for October 2009. The 2004 design was revised a couple of times and international partners were invited to join the project. In June 2006, NPO Lavochkin announced that it had begun manufacturing and testing the development version of the spacecraft's onboard equipment. On 26 March 2007, Russia and China signed a cooperative agreement on the joint exploration of Mars, which included sending China's first interplanetary probe, Yinghuo-1, to Mars together with the Fobos-Grunt spacecraft. Yinghuo-1 weighed and would have been released by the main spacecraft into a Mars orbit. Partners NPO Lavochkin was the project's main contractor developing its components. The Chief Designer of Fobos-Grunt was Maksim Martynov. Phobos soil sampling and downloading were developed by the GEOHI RAN Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Vernadski Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical chemistry) and the integrated scientific studies of Phobos and Mars by remote and contact methods were the responsibility of the Russian Space Research Institute, where Alexander Zakharov served as lead scientist of the mission. The Chinese Yinghuo-1 orbiter was launched together with Fobos-Grunt. In late 2012, after a 10–11.5-month cruise, Yinghuo-1 would have separated and entered an 800 × 80,000 km equatorial orbit (5° inclination) with a period of three days. The spacecraft was expected to remain on Martian orbit for one year. Yinghuo-1 would have focused mainly on the study of the external environment of Mars. Space center researchers expected to use photographs and data to study the magnetic field of Mars and the interaction between ionospheres, escape particles and solar wind. A second Chinese payload, the Soil Offloading and Preparation System (SOPSYS), was integrated in the lander. SOPSYS was a microgravity grinding tool developed by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Another payload on Fobos-Grunt was an experiment from the Planetary Society called Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment; its goal was to test whether selected organisms can survive a few years in deep space by flying them through interplanetary space. The experiment would have tested one aspect of transpermia, the hypothesis that life could survive space travel, if protected inside rocks blasted by impact off one planet to land on another. The Bulgarian Academy