Russian Mars Probe Crashes Into Pacific

Russian news agencies said that pieces of a failed Russian Mars probe downed into the Pacific Ocean far off the Chilean coast on Sunday.

Colonel Alexei Zolotukhin, a spokesman of the Aerospace Defense Forces, told media reporters that the debris from the Russian Phobos-Grunt craft crashed into the sea some 775 miles west of the coastal island of Wellington, Chile.

A day ago on Saturday, the Russian space agency said that fragments of its Mars probe which spiraled back to Earth after failing to head on a mission to Mars, crashed Sunday into the Pacific Ocean and the fragments of Phobos-Grunt should have fallen into the Pacific Ocean at 1745 GMT.

The media of Russia said that there was no immediate comment from Russian space agency, Roscosmos on Sunday, as the Phobos-Grunt craft approached Earth, and it had given different predictions and calculation about where it could land.

Zolotukhin told the media that the Russian space forces had closely followed the probe’s course, adding that this has allowed them to establish the place and time of the fall of the craft with a great degree of accuracy.

State media reports showed that a landing in the Pacific Ocean would be a huge relief for Roscosmos after earlier reports said it could crash into the region of a South American country, possibly in Argentina.

According to the Russian space agency, the spacecraft should have been on a mission to Mars largest moon, but instead became trapped in an Earth’s orbit that has become lower and lower as it became increasingly pulled in by Earth’s gravity.

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Tags: Aerospace Defense Forces, Argentina, Chile, island of Wellington, Mars, Pacific Ocean, probe, Roscosmos, Russia, Russian space agency