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