spacetoday.net: Russian officials suggest foreign sabotage responsible for Phobos-Grunt failure

Posted: Wed, Jan 11, 2012, 11:45 AM ET (1645 GMT)
Phobos-Grunt illustration (Roscosmos)

The head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos said Tuesday that the failure of that country's latest Mars mission may have been caused by sabotage by another nation. Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin told Russian media that "frequent failures" of Russian spacecraft like Phobos-Grunt when they are beyond the range of Russian ground stations suggested to him that they may have been been subject to "influence" by other powers. Popovkin offered no concrete evidence for any such sabotage, not indicated what country or countries could have been responsible. Popovkin admitted, though, that Russia had little choice but to launch the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft last November since some of the components of the long-delayed mission were reaching their expiration dates, and had the spacecraft not been launched it likely would have been scrapped. The spacecraft, designed to go to the Martian moon of Phobos and return samples of its surface to Earth, failed to escape Earth orbit after its launch in November. The spacecraft's orbit is decaying with reentry predicted to occur between January 14 and 16.