Russian space probe crashes into Pacific

The Zenit-2SB rocket with the Phobos-Ground probe blasts off from its launch pad at the Cos­mod­rome Baikonur, Kaza­khstan. Some of the recent fail­ures of Russ­ian space­craft may have been caused by hos­tile inter­fer­ence, Roscos­mos chief Vladimir Popovkin said. Popovkin made the com­ment when asked about the fail­ure of the unmanned Phobos-Ground probe, which was to explore one of the Mars twin moons, Pho­bos, but became stranded while orbit­ing Earth after its Nov. 9 launch. The space­craft is expected to fall to Earth around Jan. 15. ( (AP Photo, File)

VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV

Asso­ci­ated Press

MOSCOW (AP) — A Russ­ian space probe designed to boost the nation’s pride on a bold mis­sion to a moon of Mars has come down in flames, show­er­ing frag­ments into the south Pacific west of Chile’s coast, offi­cials said.

Pieces from the Phobos-Ground, which had become stuck in Earth’s orbit, landed in water Sun­day 1,250 kilo­me­ters (775 miles) west of Welling­ton Island in Chile’s south, the Russ­ian mil­i­tary Air and Space Defense Forces said in a state­ment car­ried by the country’s news agencies.

The mil­i­tary space track­ing facil­i­ties were mon­i­tor­ing the probe’s crash, its spokesman Col. Alexei Zolo­tukhin said. Zolo­tukhin said the deserted ocean area is where Rus­sia guides its dis­carded space cargo ships serv­ing the Inter­na­tional Space Station.

RIA Novosti news agency, how­ever, cited Russ­ian bal­lis­tic experts who said the frag­ments fell over a broader patch of Earth’s sur­face, spread­ing from the Atlantic and includ­ing the ter­ri­tory of Brazil. It said the mid­point of the crash zone was located in the Brazil­ian state of Goias.

The $170 mil­lion craft was one of the heav­i­est and most toxic pieces of space junk ever to crash to Earth, but space offi­cials and experts said the risks posed by its crash were min­i­mal because the toxic rocket fuel on board and most of the craft’s struc­ture would burn up in the atmos­phere high above the ground anyway.

The Phobos-Ground was designed to travel to one of Mars’ twin moons, Pho­bos, land on it, col­lect soil sam­ples and fly them back to Earth in 2014 in one of the most daunt­ing inter­plan­e­tary mis­sions ever. It got stranded in Earth’s orbit after its Nov. 9 launch, and efforts by Russ­ian and Euro­pean Space Agency experts to bring it back to life failed.

Prof. Heiner Klinkrad, Head of The Euro­pean Space Agency’s Space Debris Office that was mon­i­tor­ing the probe’s descent, said the craft didn’t pose any sig­nif­i­cant risks.

“This one is way, way down in the rank­ing,” he said in a tele­phone inter­view from his office in Berlin, adding that booster rock­ets con­tain more solid seg­ments that may sur­vive fiery re-entries.

Thou­sands of pieces of derelict space vehi­cles orbit Earth, occa­sion­ally pos­ing dan­ger to astro­nauts and satel­lites in orbit, but as far as is known, no one has ever been hurt by falling space debris.

Russia’s space agency Roscos­mos pre­dicted that only between 20 and 30 frag­ments of the Pho­bos probe with a total weight of up to 200 kilo­grams (440 pounds) would sur­vive the re-entry and plum­met to Earth.

Klinkrad agreed with that assess­ment, adding that about 100 met­ric tons of space junk fall on Earth every year. “This is 200 kilo­grams out of these 100 tons,” he said.

The Phobos-Ground weighed 13.5 met­ric tons (14.9 tons), and that included a load of 11 met­ric tons (12 tons) of highly toxic rocket fuel intended for the long jour­ney to the Mar­t­ian moon of Pho­bos and left unused as the probe got stranded in orbit around Earth.

Roscos­mos said that all of the fuel will burn up on re-entry, a fore­cast Klinkrad said was sup­ported by cal­cu­la­tions done by NASA and the ESA. He said the craft’s tanks are made of alu­minum alloy that has a very low melt­ing tem­per­a­ture, and they will burst at an alti­tude of more than 100 kilo­me­ters (60 miles).

The space era has seen far larger space­craft crash. NASA’s Sky­lab space sta­tion that went down in 1979 weighed 77 met­ric tons (85 tons) and Russia’s Mir space sta­tion that de-orbited in 2001 weighed about 130 met­ric tons (143 tons). Their descent fueled fears around the world, but the wreck­age of both fell far away from pop­u­lated areas.

The Phobos-Ground was Russia’s most expen­sive and the most ambi­tious space mis­sion since Soviet times. Its mis­sion to the crater-dented, potato-shaped Mar­t­ian moon was to give sci­en­tists pre­cious mate­ri­als that could shed more light on the gen­e­sis of the solar system.

Russia’s space chief has acknowl­edged the Phobos-Ground mis­sion was ill-prepared, but said that Roscos­mos had to give it the go-ahead so as not to miss the lim­ited Earth-to-Mars launch window.

Its pre­de­ces­sor, Mars-96, which was built by the same Moscow-based NPO Lav­ochkin com­pany, expe­ri­enced an engine fail­ure and crashed shortly after its launch in 1996. Its crash drew strong inter­na­tional fears because of around 200 grams of plu­to­nium onboard. The craft even­tu­ally show­ered its frag­ments over the Chile-Bolivia bor­der in the Andes Moun­tains, and the pieces were never recovered.

The worst ever radi­a­tion spill from a derelict space vehi­cle came in Jan­u­ary 1978 when the nuclear-powered Cos­mos 954 satel­lite crashed over north­west­ern Canada. The Sovi­ets claimed the craft com­pletely burned up on re-entry, but a mas­sive recov­ery effort by Cana­dian author­i­ties recov­ered a dozen frag­ments, most of which were radioactive.

The Phobos-Ground also con­tained a tiny quan­tity of the radioac­tive metal Cobalt-57 in one of its instru­ments, but Roscos­mos said it poses no threat of radioac­tive contamination.

The space­craft also car­ried a small cylin­der with a col­lec­tion of microbes as part of an exper­i­ment by the Pasadena, California-based Plan­e­tary Soci­ety that designed to explore whether they can sur­vive inter­plan­e­tary travel. The cylin­der is attached to a cap­sule that was sup­posed to deliver Pho­bos ground sam­ples back to Earth.

Igor Marinin, the edi­tor of Russia’s Novosti Kos­mon­avtiki mag­a­zine, said on Russia’s NTV tele­vi­sion that it would likely be destroyed.

Calls to Brazil’s National Space Insti­tute and also the Goias state secu­rity sec­re­tariat were not returned. There was no men­tion in the Brazil­ian press of any debris crash­ing in Brazil­ian territory.

Posted by AP News on Jan 15 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.