Russian space agency : Almost no chance to save Phobos mission

The Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) said Tuesday there was almost no possibility of fulfilling the Phobos-Grunt Mars probe mission. "We must be realistic. If we have not reconnected (with the space vehicle) for so long, the chances that we can complete this expedition are very slim," Roscosmos deputy head Vitaly Davydov told reporters at Mission Control near Moscow. He said Roscosmos cannot find the actual cause of the failure due to lacking of telemetric data. "There is no telemetric data. We cannot understand what is going on," he said, adding that one possibility was the control system may be operational but fuel may be leaking. He said the debris of the space vehicle might fall back to Earth from late December to February, but the precise place and time were still "unpredictable." Theoretically, the window to put Phobos-Grunt on a departure trajectory to Mars would remain open until the end of November, he said. Davydov said due to the Phobos-Grunt project failure, Roscosmos might change the direction of its future explorations, sending probes to the Moon instead. "If it becomes clear that everything has fallen though, we will settle all insurance issues and decide what to do next. We said before that the Moon would be our next step. But this will be finally decided when we understand the fate of the Phobos-Gruntian," he was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying. The Phobos-Grunt probe, carrying China's Yinghuo-1 satellite, was launched atop a Russian Zenit-2SB rocket on Nov. 9, but it failed to reach the intended orbit. Roscosmos was making efforts to restore the probe since then. Russia had spent about 5 billion rubles (about 161 million U.S. dollars) for the planned three-year mission, which would include drilling surface of the Martian moon Phobos, and returning 200 grams of soil back to Earth.