The problem began on Wednesday after an initially successful launch of a Russian Zenit-2 rocket carrying the long-planned Phobos-Grunt spacecraft into Earth orbit. From there, booster rockets would kick in and send the space craft on its year-long mission to Phobos, the largest and innermost of two Mars moons. There was just one (very big) problem: the rocket’s propulsion system failed — twice.
Quoting from a recent NY Times piece, Vladimir Popovkin, the director of Roscosmos (Russia’s space agency) stated: “The engines did not fire, not the first or the second time.”
The remaining stage of the rocket and its payload — the Phobos-Grunt probe — is currently “stuck” in an ovoid orbit some 129 miles (about 190 km) above Earth, where the atmosphere, though thin, is thick enough to cause sufficient drag to pull the stranded rocket back down towards Earth, possibly triggering a large explosion due to the large quantity of highly volatile and toxic hydrazine rocket fuel on board (note: approximately 2/3 of its weight is rocket fuel) .... Read more at http://planetsave.com
