The Situation
The Foton unmanned recoverable spacecraft series was first introduced by the former Soviet Union with an inaugural flight in 1985 after the successful Soviet Soyuz rockets and capsules from the 1960s. It was conceived as a microgravity platform for physicists and materials scientists to complement the very similar Bion capsules that were aimed at life science studies. In recent years, an increasing number of biology and non-microgravity experiments were transferred to Foton, while the Bion program was discontinued. The Foton-M3 Russian spacecraft is designed to perform space experiments during a short mission life (generally up to two weeks). The Russian Space Agency, Roskosmos, is responsible for the spacecraft while ESA is responsible for its payload and experiments. The FreqBone project was completed and the experimental test done on the Russian Foton-M3 Rocket ESA, and indeed it was one of fourteen ESA experiments in the rocket payload bay including ones for fluid physics, biology, protein crystal growth, meteoritics, radiation dosimetry and exobiology.