The manufacture of a low cost instrument for the Mars 96 mission

The Mars spacecraft was launched in November 1996, into low Earth orbit by a Proton D rocket, the second most powerful launch vehicle available to the Russian space program. This paper details the low cost manufacture of satellite experiments and describes the rationale, development and manufacture of the sensor interface unit, one of the Fonema instruments core sub-systems. Fonema is one of a series of plasma instruments that will be flown onboard the Mars´96 spacecraft. The stages of development include the instrument concept, technical requirement definition, design requirements, block diagram, preliminary design, breadboard model, engineering model, flight model and flight spare. This paper concentrates on the initial design concept through to block diagram stage