Russian Mars Probe Phobos-Grunt remains silent in Earth's Orbit

From Spaceflight Now--

By Stephen Clark

Russia officially remained silent on the status of its beleaguered Phobos-Grunt Mars probe Friday as concerns grew that the toxic fuel-laden spacecraft could crash back to Earth by December.

File photo of Phobos-Grunt during launch preparations. Credit: Roscosmos

Efforts to salvage the Phobos-Grunt mission Wednesday and Thursday were unsuccessful, but the Russian space agency issued no updates on the recovery following an initial statement after launch.

Phobos-Grunt is still circling Earth at an altitude between 128 miles and 210 miles after launching Tuesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

After being shot into orbit by a Zenit rocket, the 29,000-pound spacecraft was supposed to fire its engines twice to accelerate to escape velocity, the speed required to overcome Earth's gravity and head for Mars.

But neither rocket burn occurred, and Russian engineers don't know why. Phobos-Grunt's rocket pack was scheduled to fire over South America, out of range of Russian ground tracking sites.

Russia did not request support from European and U.S. communications stations in the Americas before the mission, but ESA ground sites in South America and Australia have been listening for radio signals from Phobos-Grunt.

Phobos-Grunt was heading to the Martian moon Phobos, where it would touch down, gather a half-pound of samples and return them to Earth in a shielded re-entry capsule.

With no success so far in reviving the $163 million mission, experts are more convinced Phobos-Grunt will crash somewhere on Earth in the next few weeks. For now, Russia plans to keep trying.

Major General Vladimir Uvarov, a former space expert in the Russian military, told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta newspaper he has lost optimism in Phobos-Grunt's chances for recovery.

"In my opinion, the Phobos-Grunt probe has been lost. This probability is very high. At any rate, it is much higher than the chances for reactivating the probe," Uvarov told the newspaper.

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