Russia's Mars spacecraft to fall back to Earth
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Xinhua, January 14, 2012
Russia's failed Phobos-Grunt Mars probe spacecraft will likely plunge back to Earth between Jan 15 and Jan 16, Russian and US media reported Friday.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos was quoted by the Ria Novosti news agency as saying that the 14-ton spacecraft that carries 11 tons of toxic rocket fuel, would fall sometime between Sunday and Monday morning into the Atlantic Ocean.
Most of it will burn up in the atmosphere, but 20 to 30 chunks of charred debris, weighing about 200 kg, could make it to the surface, while the toxic fuel would burn in the atmosphere at a height of about 100 kilometers, said Roscosmos. Just where it might crash will not be clear until just hours before it actually happens.
In the United States, researchers said the spacecraft would re-enter the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean, east of Argentina, and the debris would fall between 02:39 GMT Jan 15 and 07:39 GMT Jan 16, according to ABC News.
But US researchers also agreed there is no way to control or predict the exact location where the spacecraft would come down.
Phobos Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary mission in decades tasked to explore one of Mars' two moons, was launched on Nov 9 but got stuck in Earth orbit due to propulsion failure and radio contact was lost.
The world's space agencies agreed that any one person's chances of getting hit by debris are tiny - something like 1 in 20 trillion, based on the spacecraft's orbit and the amount of debris that might survive re-entry. The chances that of the 7 billion people on Earth, one of them, somewhere, could be hit are more like 1 in 3,000.
NASA's UARS satellite sent debris crashing into the Pacific in September, and the German ROSAT space telescope scattered debris in the Indian Ocean in October.
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