UPDATE: 1/15/2012 11:30AM PST The probe is down, but see how the BBC fouled up the reporting of it here -Anthony
Look up in the air, it’s a bird, its a plane, no it’s Phobos-Grunt! Video follows.
From Sky News: An out of control Russian spacecraft could crash land on southern England sometime this weekend, scientists have warned.
The minibus-sized Phobos Grunt is loaded with 11 tonnes of fuel that was supposed to take it to Mars and one of its moons.
But the on-board computer failed shortly after take-off last November and the spacecraft’s orbit of the Earth has been getting lower ever since.
Chief engineer at the UK Space Agency Professor Richard Crowther said it is expected to explode as it enters the atmosphere, scattering debris along a 200km track – anywhere between the M4 corridor and the Falkland Islands.
But he told Sky News that fragments are most likely to fall into the sea: “If you look at the Earth from space, most of it is covered by water.
“The UK is very small by comparison. The probability of it falling in such a small area is very, very low.
“It doesn’t keep me awake at night.”
The Russian space agency Roscosmos estimates that between 20 and 30 fragments, weighing 200kg in total, will make it back to the Earth’s surface.
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It doesn’t look good:
Image from heavens-above.com
“Phobos-Grunt fragments have crashed down in the Pacific Ocean,” Russia’s Defense Ministry official Alexei Zolotukhin told RIA Novosti, adding that the fragments fell in 1,250 kilometers to the west of the island of Wellington.
The spacecraft fell at about 21:45 on Sunday Moscow time [17:45 GMT].
From http://en.rian.ru/world/20120115/170769403.html
It’s down in the Pacific
Phew! Southern UK safe. It fell to Earth near New Zealand. Looking at a globe, that was one prediction that couldn’t have been more wrong!
Now for all the other wrong predictions…
Thanks for the reply Ric.
From the map I saw, it landed closer to the Falklands than New Zealand. The Falklands is “southern UK,” right? 🙂
“Plenty of posts here rubbishing Russian workmanship, but it’s hardly a uniquely Russian trait to have this sort of failure.”
From what I’ve read, there were major management problems with this project, up to and including rewiring a fully-fuelled spacecraft and installing new flight controller software on the launch pad due to catrastrophic bugs in the installed version. To me it looks like they cut corners to hit this launch window and that’s why it failed. See, for example:
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/phobos_grunt_2011.html
It’s a shame it failed, because it would have been a cool mission. But from reading that and similar articles I’d have been surprised if it worked.
Okay, I’m seeing claims from Roscosmos, etc, that it reentered over the pacific, west of Chile, and that claim has been warped by the press to be that that’s where the debris came down.
One big thing they seem to be missing; entry is NOT the spot above where the debris will come down. If it hit entry interface 700 miles off Chile, then my guess for where the debris ended up is somewhere in South America.
Also, take Russian claims with a grain of salt. They lied when Mars 96 came down in Peru with a large load of plutonium, saying it came down in the pacific.