The Russian probe Phobos-Grunt falls in Chile

Theremnants of the Russian Phobos-Grunt probe, whose reentry to Earth was monitored by space agencies around the planet,have finally fallen into waters of the Pacific Ocean, west of Chile, after two months in orbit over the Earth, as reported by a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, Colonel Alexei Zolotujin. “Fragments of the Phobos-Grunt have crashed into the Pacific Ocean,” Zolotujin told the RIA Novosti news agency. Specifically, the wreckage would have hit some1,250 kilometers west of Wellington Island, located in Chilean Patagonia. The spacecraft touched the planet’s surface at around 9:45 p.m. Moscow time (6:45 p.m. Spanish peninsular time) after a rapid descent from an orbit between 133 and 113 kilometers high, according to data from the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Phobos-Grunt weighed13.5 tons, although its fuel would have been destroyed in the densest layers of the atmosphere. Therefore, between twenty and thirty fragments would have fallen to the surface whose total weight would not exceed 200 kilograms, according to Russian experts.

The Phobos-Grunt probe wasReleased on November 8, 2011to an initial orbit of 206 x 341 km, where a failure prevented its insertion in the trajectory that would take it towardsMars. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, officially declared the failure of the mission to the red planet on December 13. On January 2, the Inter-Agency Committee for the Coordination of Space Debris (IADC) began an intensive campaign to predict the conditions of the reentry of Phobos-Grunt in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The IADC is a technical forum made up of 12 space agencies, including ESA, NASA, and Roscosmos. Its main objective is to coordinate the activities derived from the presence of inoperative satellites, fragments of artificial objects and micrometeorites orbiting our planet.