Russia's Phobos-Grunt Expected To Re-Enter Atmosphere Sunday | Aero-News Network
Aero-News Network
RSS icon RSS feed
podcast icon MP3 podcast
Subscribe Aero-News e-mail Newsletter Subscribe

Airborne Unlimited -- Most Recent Daily Episodes

Episode Date

Airborne-Monday

Airborne-Tuesday

Airborne-Wednesday Airborne-Thursday

Airborne-Friday

Airborne On YouTube

Airborne-Unlimited-05.12.25

Airborne-NextGen-05.06.25

AirborneUnlimited-05.07.25

Airborne-AffordableFlyers-05.08.25

AirborneUnlimited-05.09.25

Sat, Jan 14, 2012

Russia's Phobos-Grunt Expected To Re-Enter Atmosphere Sunday

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.”

FMI: www.federalspace.ru/?lang=en, www.aero.org/capabilities/cords/index.html

Advertisement

More News

Aero-News: Quote of the Day (05.13.25)

“...no entity, whether a division of government or a private company or corporation, may use information broadcast or collected by automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast >[...]

IAG Orders 76 Boeing, Airbus Airliners

Growth And Fleet Replacements On The Way International Airlines Group, a joint holding company between British and Spanish air carriers, announced it has ordered up to 76 new Boein>[...]

FAA Shuts Down ATC Oversight Review Amid Scrutiny

Expert Analysts Scrutinized the FAA’s Oversight of ATC Organization In a move that appears somewhat mistimed (at best…tone-deaf at worst), the Federal Aviation Adminis>[...]

Montana’s ADS-B Privacy Bill Signed Into Law

Community Continues to Push Back Against ADS-B-Facilitated Landing Fees On May 8, a bill to limit frivolous use of ADS-B tracking data was signed into law by Montana Governor Greg >[...]

Newark Falls Victim to More Equipment Outages

Duffy Shares Plans to Scale Back Flights at Newark Liberty International After a ‘telecommunications issue’ with Philadelphia TRACON brought yet another string of delay>[...]

blog comments powered by Disqus



Advertisement

Advertisement

Podcasts

Advertisement

© 2007 - 2025 Web Development & Design by Pauli Systems, LC