Did underfunding doom Phobos probe?

Mars has claimed many a spacecraft as victim, and the latest one, a Russian space probe, looks likely to tumble to Earth very soon.

Russia’s Phobos-grunt (“grunt” is Russian for ground or soil) mission aimed for a first landing of a probe on the Martian moon Phobos. Launched Nov. 8, the spacecraft reached Earth orbit but failed to fire the rocket that would send it on an eight-month interplanetary trip to Mars. It’s likely to fall to Earth around Jan. 15, the Russian Defense Ministry concluded, the victim of a steadily dropping orbit.

“Way too ambitious and way too underfunded to reach its goal,” space law attorney Michael Listner says.

The $163 million spacecraft carried a piggybacked Chinese Mars orbiter added late to the mission.

After weeks of attempts to re-establish radio communication by European Space Agency and NASA transmitters and fleeting hints of contact, Russian space agency officials declared the craft a loss last month.

Mars has claimed overly thrifty probes before. NASA’S Mars Polar Lander, a $120 million spacecraft, was judged about 30% underfunded by an accident panel after its calamitous crash in 1999. Testing shortfalls probably played a role in the craft’s landing rockets malfunctioning.

“The Phobos science team would like to repeat the mission using experience that we got working on this mission,” said an e-mail from mission scientist Alexander Zakharov of the Space Research Institute in Moscow.

He says any decision will be up to ROSCOSMOS, the Russian space agency, which is likely to conclude an accident investigation this month.

On the positive side, PhobosGrunt’s aluminum fuel tank holding 8.3 tons of toxic fuel is likely to safely burn up during re-entry. “Aluminum has a very low melting temperature and rarely survives,” says space debris expert Nicholas Johnson of NASA’S Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The satellite could land anywhere from 51.4 degrees north latitude, about as far north as London, to 51.4 degrees south latitude, nearly as far south as the tip of South America.