Phobos-Grunt to crash 1/15/2012

William Atkins
Monday, 16 January 2012 00:48

Science - Space

According to Russian space officials, the Phobos-Grunt probe, originally to go to the Mars' moon Phobos and launched on November 9, 2011, will instead come crashing down back to Earth sometime on Sunday, January 15, 2012.

 

The Russian Federal Space Agency (also called Roscosmos), which is the Russian space agency (like the United States' NASA), stated on Sunday that the unmanned Phobos-Grunt (Grunt is ground [soil] in Russian) probe will reenter Earth's atmosphere and hit Earth sometime between 11:41 a.m. and 4:04 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

That relates to a time of 1641 and 2105 Greenwich Mean Time [GMT]) on Sunday, 1/15/2012.

Its crash corridor on Earth could be anywhere in Australia, Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia.

Don't worry -- you folks in the United States, Canada, and Russia -- because these regions are probably outside of the crash area for the doomed probe.

However, most likely the probe will crash into water, because more water than land occurs over the possible crash area here on Earth.

However, there is concern about the crash because the Phobos-Grunt probe is very heavy - at about 14.9 tons (13.5 metric tons).

Being so massive, the probe will very likely partially survive its plunge through Earth's atmosphere and large pieces will most likely impact Earth.

Page two concludes.