Mars probe ingloriously ends up in Pacific

Russia vowed yesterday to expose the officials responsible for the failure of a Mars probe that the military said crashed into the Pacific Ocean after being stuck in orbit around the Earth for more than two months.
The 13.5-tonne Phobos-Grunt probe re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere late Sunday, apparently crashing into the Pacific in an ignominious end to an ill-fated bid to relaunch Russia’s interplanetary programme, the military said.
Russia’s space agency also said it believes fragments of the probe crashed Sunday “into the Pacific Ocean at 1745 GMT,” however the exact location where the probe crashed remained unclear on yesterday.
It had blasted off November 9 on an ambitious mission to collect soil samples from Mars’ largest moon Phobos. But its booster rockets never triggered and the probe lost contact with ground control and spiralled into an uncontrolled descent.
“I’m taking personal control of the investigation into the reasons for the Phobos-Grunt accident,” Russia’s former ambassador to NATO and recently appointed Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin wrote on his Twitter account..
“I am expecting Roscosmos’ promised report on the reasons for the accidents, the names of the anti-heroes and also its view on the prospects for developing the space sector up to 2030,” he wrote.
He added that he would attend a meeting with constructors on January 31.
A lack of information about what happened on board is likely to hamper investigators in pinning down the cause of the failure, a source in the space industry told the Interfax news agency.
“There is practically no telemetric information from onboard the craft. There is also not enough supporting evidence to draw a picture of what happened on board.”
It also remains unclear how much of the probe burned up in the atmosphere and which fragments then could have made contact with the surface of the Earth.
Sky gazers reported the gold-coloured vessel emitting a bright orange glow as it traversed the globe in an eastward direction between London to the north and New Zealand to the south.