Sat, Jan 14, 2012
Experts Predict 20-30 Small Pieces Could Survive Re-Entry
What's left of the Russian Phobos-Grunt Mars Probe is expected
to fall back to Earth Sunday, with about 20-30 small
(ish) pieces of the spacecraft surviving the re-entry.
Russia launched the probe, which was to have studied Mars' moon
Phobos, on November 8th. But after insertion into low Earth orbit,
Russian mission controllers lost and were unable to re-establish
contact with the spacecraft. That made it impossible for them to
make the necessary course corrections to send it on to Mars.
The orbit has been decaying steadily since then, and the UK
paper The Telegraph reports that the expected re-entry
date is now Sunday. The spacecraft is expected to fall into the
Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America.
The sections that survive re-entry will probably weigh under 400
lbs each. Much of the spacecraft's current mass is made up of
unused fuel which would have propelled the probe on to Mars.
Experts say that the risk of the debris falling on land, let
alone a populated area, is very small. The timing and track have
been estimated by the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies
at the Aerospace Corporation.
The failure of the probe, as well as some other high-profile
Russian space failures, have drawn out the conspiracy theorists in
that country. Vladimie Popovkin, who leads the Russian space
agency, said in a recent interview that he thinks there may be some
foul play involved in the recent accidents, perhaps even an attack
by another country. In the interview, translated by The New York
Times, Popovkin reportedly said “We don’t want to
accuse anybody, but there are very powerful devices that can
influence spacecraft now. The possibility they were used cannot be
ruled out.”
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