Named after the bellicose god of war, Mars has claimed many a victim, and the latest one, a Russian space probe, looks likely to tumble to Earth very soon.
Launched Nov. 8 from Kazakhstan, 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. The $163 million spacecraft also carried a piggybacked Chinese Mars orbiter added late to the mission, and a Planetary Society microbe experiment.
Sadly, the spacecraft reached orbit around Earth but failed to fire the rocket that would send it on an eight-month interplanetary trip. The cause of the failure is the subject of an open investigation by Russian space officials.
"Way too ambitious, and way too underfunded, to reach its goal," says space law attorney Michael Listner, a writer forThe Space Review. "Adding the Chinese orbiter late seems to have pushed the risk to the mission very, very high."
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