COMMENTARY | ABC News reports the remnants of the Russian Phobos-Grunt probe crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, thus ending the latest attempt by Russia to revive its planetary probe program. The Russians said most of it burned in the atmosphere.
Phobos-Grunt was launched in November with the mission of landing on Phobos, a Martian moon, taking a soil and rock sample and delivering it back to Earth for study. It was to be the first Russian space probe beyond low Earth orbit since the failure of a Mars probe in the mid-1990s.
Unfortunately, contact was lost with Phobos-Grunt soon after it failed to execute a rocket burn that would have sent it on its way to Mars orbit. Despite the best efforts of the Russians, aided by the European Space Agency, the probe could not be saved.
The orbit of Phobos-Grunt decayed until it entered the Earth's atmosphere on Sunday. About 450 pounds of the probe likely crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Despite the fact that the probe carried a load of toxic fuel, the main damage appears to be to Russian pride.
Most Western analysts believe the failure of Phobos-Grunt had to do with poor quality control during its processing. But the U.K. Telegraph reports a story that some Russians are blaming an American radar for causing the failure of the probe. The Russians are conducting a number of experiments to see whether this explanation is plausible.
Blaming the Americans is certainly a convenient way to assuage Russian pride, hurt as it has been by a number of launch failures. But the story of a nefarious American radar causing the failure of Phobos-Grunt is not likely to be believed by many people in the West. Indeed, if the Russians start to fix on that idea, they might not be motivated to pay attention to the real problems facing their space effort.
Space exploration, because of its technological complexity and the harsh environment of space, is unforgiving of human error. The history of the space age is replete with dead satellites and dead astronauts and cosmonauts that attest to that fact.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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