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Subscribe to RSSAGI animation shows where Russia's Phobos-Grunt probe would have gone, and what will happen instead.
When and where will Russia's doomed probe to a Martian moon fall back to Earth? The RIA-Novosti news service caused a stir when it reported that the 13-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft would crash in southwestern Afghanistan at 2:22 a.m. Moscow time on Jan. 14. The report attributed the prediction to the U.S. Strategic Command, but experts say it's way too early to be that precise about the Phobos-Grunt debris zone.
"Yes, it is much too early to predict" the circumstances of Phobos-Grunt's re-entry, Gene Stansbery of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office at Johnson Space Center told me today.
The U.S. Strategic Command is being circumspect as well, deferring comment to NASA and to Roscosmos, Russia's space agency.
The most that can be said about the impact zone right now is that it will be somewhere between 51.4 degrees north and 51.4 degrees south latitude. That's a swath of the planet that stretches from Calgary, Alberta (or Ghent, Belgium) in the north to the Falkland Islands in the south and takes in the vast majority of the world's population. Satellite-watcher Marco Langbroek reports on the See-Sat-L discussion forum that the predicted time of re-entry is Jan. 13, plus or minus 11 days. A couple of weeks ago, Roscosmos estimated that re-entry would come sometime between Jan. 6 and 19.
Typically, the projected area of the debris zone can't be narrowed down until hours before re-entry, if then. It's possible that RIA-Novosti picked up on a prediction that was centered around a precise time and place of re-entry, but left out the part about the plus-or-minus uncertainty. (You can see where Phobos-Grunt is right now by checking the Heavens-Above website.)
The spacecraft was launched from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Nov. 9 local time, and was supposed to leave Earth orbit hours later for the trip to Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons. Along the way, it would have deployed a Chinese mini-probe in Martian orbit. If everything went well, the $165 million Phobos-Grunt mission would have brought a sample of Phobos soil back to Earth in 2014. ("Phobos-Grunt," or the more correctly transliterated "Fobos-Grunt," is Russian for "Phobos-Soil.")
Everything didn't go well, as we now know: The spacecraft's upper-stage thrusters didn't fire, and it's been stuck in Earth orbit ever since. This month, Russian officials finally gave up on attempts to revive the craft and admitted that it would fall to its destruction next month.
Most of the spacecraft's mass consists of the toxic propellants it would have used to get to Phobos. There's also a small amount of radioactive cobalt-57 that was meant to power a spectrometer. The Russians say that the fuel will burn up in Earth's atmosphere, and that the cobalt won't pose a contamination threat.
Twenty to 30 parts from the probe with a total weight of up to 440 pounds (200 kilograms) are expected to survive the plunge. One of those parts could be the sample return capsule, which is designed to withstand the intense heat of atmospheric re-entry. David Warmflash, the principal investigator for one of the mission's experiments, said "it is quite possible" that his team's LIFE capsule will make it back to Earth intact.
If it lands in Afghanistan, the chances of recovery might be poor, given the proximity to a war zone. But if it lands in the ocean, which is currently the likeliest scenario, the chances aren't any better. Over the past few months, two other high-profile satellites — NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite and Germany's ROSAT space telescope — fell through the atmosphere over the South Pacific and the Bay of Bengal, respectively, and no trace of them was ever found.
More about Phobos-Grunt and other falls to Earth:
- Mars probe to crash to Earth in January
- Russian leader suggests punishing space failures
- Skywatcher snaps photos of stranded probe
- Christmas Eve fireball sparked by Russian rocket debris
- Russian communications satellite falls after launch
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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Get your tin foil helmets on, here comes another one. :-P
Just to pre-empt all the conspiracy theorists, there is no truth to the rumor that the probe was sabotaged to prevent it confirming that Phobos is an artificial construct..I'm not making that up, but I'm sure those believe it have had their opinions confirmed. ;-)
Good lord. The crazy-as-a-@!$%#house-rat conspiracy theorists are saying that Phobos is an artificial satellite? And an electro-magnetic pulse was used to disable the probe to keep it from completing its mission and discovering the true nature of Mars' moons?
I mean, damn.
Actually, there was some serious speculation about Phobos being hollow / artificial in the 50s and 60s, but only the loonies (phobies?) believe it anymore:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(moon)
Shklovsky's "Hollow Phobos" hypothesis
In the late 1950s and 1960s, the unusual orbital characteristics of Phobos led to speculations that it might be hollow.
Around 1958, Russian astrophysicist Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky, studying the secular acceleration of Phobos' orbital motion, suggested a "thin sheet metal" structure for Phobos, a suggestion which led to speculations that Phobos was of artificial origin.[44] Shklovsky based his analysis on estimates of the upper Martian atmosphere's density, and deduced that for the weak braking effect to be able to account for the secular acceleration, Phobos had to be very light — one calculation yielded a hollow iron sphere 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) across but less than 6 cm thick.[44][45] In a February 1960 letter to the journal Astronautics,[46] Fred Singer, then science advisor to U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, said of Shklovsky's theory:
Subsequently, the systemic data errors that Singer predicted were found to exist, and the claim was called into doubt,[47] and accurate measurements of the orbit available by 1969 showed that the discrepancy did not exist.[48] Singer's critique was justified when earlier studies were discovered to have used an overestimated value of 5 cm/yr for the rate of altitude loss, which was later revised to 1.8 cm/yr.[49] The secular acceleration is now attributed to tidal effects,[47] which had not been considered in the earlier studies. The density of Phobos has now been directly measured by spacecraft to be 1.887 g/cm3.[4] Current observations are consistent with Phobos being a rubble pile.[4] In addition, images obtained by the Viking probes in the 1970s clearly showed a natural object, not an artificial one.
However, mapping by the Mars Express probe and subsequent volume calculations do suggest the presence of voids within the moon and indicate that it is not a solid chunk of rock but a porous body instead.[50] The porosity of Phobos was calculated to be 30% ± 5%, or a quarter to a third of the moon being hollow. This void space is mostly on small scales (millimeters to ~1-m), between individual grains and boulders.[6]
This could be a lot more sinister than we are being told. Anybody know about EMP? Tin foil might not be that far fetched. An old air-cooled VW Beetle could be worth it's weight in gold. Pre-computer cars will be the only ones that run, not to mention electricity, and the food chain. Might want to also read this:
http://www.thetotalcollapse.com/us-warned-could-soon-face-russian-wrath-from-space/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheTotalCollapse+%28The+Total+Collapse%29
I have three old diesel trucks, no computers. I should be able to clean up for a while.
And my wife thought I was wasting money on those 80's model trucks
According to the "total collapse" site backfire recommends:
Most ominous about this report is Director Popovkin stating in it that the failure of Phobos-Grunt appears related to an “override command” of its internal systems issued by as yet “unknown forces,” but which Lieutenant General Nikolay Rodionov, a retired commander of Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system, blamed on the United States High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) by stating that these “powerful American radars could have influenced the control systems of our interplanetary rover.”
General Rodionov’s claims about the US being responsible for the failure of this Mars probe were disputed by Craig Selcher, HAARP program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, who stated that the maximum energy that Phobos–Grunt could have felt from HAARP would have equaled a power density of 1.03 milliwatts per square centimeter which he said was like shining a 60-watt light bulb on the craft from 21 meters.
Director Popovkin in his report, however, counters Mr. Selcher’s claims of HAARP’s power being insufficient to affect Phobos-Grunt by noting that all of the instruments on the spacecraft do, indeed, operate in the milliwatts range as is common with all such interstellar vehicles traveling great distances and needing to conserve power.
** I was unaware that Phobos-Grunt was an interstellar vehicle, but clearly I don't have access to the valuable sources of information which that website does.
Sounds like its already landed in Africa. There were reports yesterday of a giant globe crash landing.
I hope it lands in my yard, maybe I do have a retirement plan after all. Could just buy a lottery ticket, yea that is a plan.
Time to test the star-wars technology. It should be a snap to blast the plummeting probe into a million pieces, which should then burn up before reaching earth.
Keith, you might be in a good position with those old diesels, provided you can find fuel. And the odds of this happening are only slightly a little better than the Mayan's doomsday for next December. But EMP is real. The US military has this technology developed into a fine art. You can bet the Russians do also. It won't land in your yard, but would detonate 30 - 150 miles up in the atmosphere. Nothing electronic made within the last 50 years would work. No TV, cell phones, radio, cars, trucks, .........this means NO FOOD, unless you grow, catch, or shoot your own. I'd hang on to those trucks.
I hadn't heard about EMP, I knew that there were some natural things that could produce similar effects. I just recently started trying to understand the HARPP system that The United States has and every other major power in the World. I haven't quite got my brain around that yet.
I will look up EMP techonology when I get a little time.
I am not a conspiracy advocate and I do not wear foil hats. I think governments do what they do best with this in mind and a crash landing in Afghanistan I wonder if it could be a spy satellite???
Forget Afghan. They will detonate this over Kansas.
I'm voting for it falling into Tehran! Preferably right onto the head of their chief Mullah (-:
The whole 'Afghanistan' thing is a Russian journalist's imbecility -- the prediction was for a three week period centered at a certain time/location with days of error -- a million miles or more of potential error -- before and after. But expect more media misunderstandings in the days ahead.
Conspiracy nut? I resemble that. But Shirley we must face facts, or possibilities that have been reported in reliable sources. This was no accident. For those who do not know, EMP - electro magnetic pulse - can occur when a massive explosion occurs in our atmosphere. This explosion is easiest obtained through a carefully planned nuclear device. This bird the ruskies built has all these ingredients. Nuclear rods and enough space fuel to last to mars. This is plenty ingredients to re-direct this baby directly over north America. And if it detonated, life as we know it would change forever. At least for those of us who are lucky enough to survive, there will be Obama and the UN to provide relief.
I hope the conspirators are wrong on this, because it could very well go off Jan 9th. That's the night BAMA will crush LSU and further distance itself from the other college football want-to-be's with their 14th National Championship. Then the world can go to hell. An economic collapse is bad enough, if there ever were an EMP event in the USA, it's lights out, literally and for a very, very long time.
A) If Roscosmos could control the probe, it would be on its way to Mars by now.
B) According to the article, "There's also a small amount of radioactive cobalt-57 that was meant to power a spectrometer." - I seriously doubt that would be enough to produce a massive explosion in our atmosphere that will change life as we know it forever.
US, Russia, China all have the capability of hitting it with a missile. Pick the right time and the debris will not remain in orbit for a significant time. Let's make it a contest! lol
EMP can come from a massive solar storm as well and i the year of 2012 is predicted to be a huge spike in solar activity. The last time the earth had a major storm was before electronics. Also there are far greater things to worrie about than food and not being able to start your car.. we use power to contain some things and even back up generators would not function.. anyhow as far as the probe... no its just another pos that russia made...
Afghanistan??? To channel W.C. Fields, "On the whole, I'd rather be on Mars."