China wrote off its orbiter, a tiny craft called Yinghuo-1, as a total loss in mid-November. But the Planetary Society has said that its project — the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, or LIFE — may survive re-entry, since it was tucked inside Phobos-Grunt's return capsule.
It may even be possible to salvage some science out of LIFE, researchers say, but only if the return capsule survives and is recovered.
The sky is falling
Phobos-Grunt's fall may add to a growing perception that the sky is falling, for it was the third uncontrolled re-entry of a big spacecraft in the last four months.
NASA's 6.5-ton UARS satellite came down in September, and the 2.7-ton German satellite ROSAT followed one month later. Both crashed over stretches of empty ocean, causing no casualites. (Nobody is known to have ever been injured by a piece of man-made space debris.)
While they're temporally linked, the three spacecraft falls differ in significant ways. UARS and ROSAT, for example, were decommissioned satellites that finished their science work years ago and then spiraled downward in slowly decaying orbits. Phobos-Grunt, by contrast, lived fast and died young without accomplishing its mission.
Also, Phobos-Grunt was much heavier than either UARS or ROSAT. At 14.5 tons, the Russian Mars probe was the most massive satellite to fall uncontrolled to Earth since NASA's 85-ton Skylab space station in 1979.
Russia's 135-ton Mir space station remains the largest single man-made object to re-enter our atmosphere. Engineers de-orbited Mir in a controlled fashion in 2001.
- The Crash of Failed Mars Probe Phobos-Grunt (Infographic)
- Worst Space Debris Events of All Time
- Gallery: 'Space Junk 3D' - The Movie
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8 Comments
Add CommentThe re-entry of a big spacecraft with fuel should be a bright event. Was it possible to use a surveilance satellite to make a video?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf this had been an asteroid would our ability to track it be as feeble as the tracking of this 14.5 ton satellite? Somewhere in the Atlantic, ends up somewhere in the Pacific... had we wanted to "shoot it down" would we have been able to, or are we deluding ourselves Hollywood style?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLets hope the Russians learn a bit more quality control with there spacecraft.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn even better result will be the US realizing the door is still open for the US to be the premier space country again before Russia or China do it.
As I understand it(I hope), the uncertainty was due to the fact that the craft was in orbit around the Earth at an altitude where the upper atmosphere is capable of influencing the moment of reentry in a way that is difficult to predict accurately.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn asteroid comes from deep space, so the atmosphere only becomes a factor at the very end of its flight. Provided we know its orbit in advance, we can establish the point of impact with greater certainty.
You can find a better explanation here: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/solar-effects.html
Anyway, farewell to my 50 bucks (the Planetary Society's LIFE experiment)...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'but Comrade General, I did not use defective material, I only used the American concept of buying from da lowest contract bid'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am expecting a genetic event from sts 107. After a large CME.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLow earth orbits are extremely difficult to predict with accuracy due to the unpredictability of the atmospheric drag on the satellite. If it had been an asteroid coming from deep space, tracking would have been easier once it approached earth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, we have no means to "shoot down" anything in space or in orbit in either case. Devices of that sort have not yet been created.