MOSCOW, (Reuters) – Pieces of a failed Russian Mars probe plummeted into the Pacific Ocean far off the Chilean coast yesterday, Russian news agencies cited a military official as saying.
Debris from the Phobos-Grunt craft fell into the sea some 1,250 km (775 miles) west of the coastal island of Wellington, state-run RIA and Itar-Tass cited Aerospace Defence Forces spokesman Colonel Alexei Zolotukhin as saying.
The spacecraft never made it out of Earth’s orbit after its November launch on a rare interplanetary mission for Russia’s struggling space programme.
It was not immediately clear whether all the parts of the craft that did not burn up in the atmosphere had fallen in the same area.
RIA cited an unnamed source in a separate Russian military branch as saying ballistics experts calculated that debris could have fallen anywhere in a broad area centred on Brazil.
Russia’s space agency Roskosmos had said debris from its doomed 14-ton craft, which included 11 tons of toxic rocket fuel, might fall in the Atlantic Ocean about midway between Brazil and West Africa.
Roskosmos and the military could not be reached for comment.
Due to constant changes in the upper atmosphere, which is strongly influenced by solar activity, the exact time and place of the probe’s return had been unknown.
The $165-million spacecraft, designed to retrieve soil samples from the Martian moon Phobos, was meant to be Russia’s first successful interplanetary mission in over two decades.
But it became stuck in orbit after a botched launch on Nov. 9, and had since been slowly losing altitude due to gravity’s pull.
