A Russian spacecraft designed to bring back soil samples from one of the moons of Mars veered off course on Wednesday after its launch, clouding hopes Russia could pull off its first interplanetary mission in more than two decades. Russian space agency chief Vladimir Popovkin said an engine failed to fire on the unmanned Phobos-Grunt probe after it reached Earth's orbit, leaving Moscow with just two weeks to fix the problem before a window for reaching Mars closes.
Space officials initially said the $163 million craft had only three days of battery power left, but later said it could remain operational for two weeks. But they worried the 12.5-tonne craft could plunge from its low orbit into Earth's atmosphere in days.
"The engine did not fire, neither the first nor the second burn occurred," state television quoted Popovkin as saying at Russia's Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan. The mission to bring back a sample of soil - "grunt" in Russian - from the Martian moon Phobos was supposed to reassert Russia's place at the front line of space exploration. Failure would be a major blow to the pride of Russia's space industry, which was crimped by budget cuts and a brain drain following the 1991 Soviet collapse and suffered a humiliating series of setbacks this year. If Moscow cannot bounce the craft out of orbit, the probe could plummet into the atmosphere, with some Russian media speculating smouldering chunks could crash back to Earth.
However, space expert Igor Marinin said it was more likely to explode into a ball of flame, burning up entirely, due to large amounts of fuel on board. "It can survive in this orbit five, six, maybe seven days: Either they raise its orbit in this time and continue to work on fixing whatever went wrong or it will fall," Marinin, editor of the industry journal Novosti Kosmonavtiki, told Reuters.
"If in the next two weeks our engineers don't think up anything, then it will already be useless to send it to Mars because it either won't make it there or it will fly past it." Wednesday's launch was set during a rare window to strike our toward the Red Planet when it is closest to Earth. Such chances come for a brief period every 780 days. Phobos-Grunt missed its last 2009 launch window over delays in construction.
Space agency Roskosmos said it must wait until the craft made its next pass over a ground control centre in Baikonur to have contact and try to find out why it failed. "They say there is hope to reset it, apparently it's a problem with the programming but there is very little time," the lead mission scientist Alexander Zakharov of the Space Research Institute told Reuters.
"It's very sad that this is how it all worked out but this is a consequence of our lack of people after such a big interval... We are working almost from scratch." The 5-billion-rouble ($163 million) probe blasted off at 12:16 am Moscow time (2016 GMT Tuesday) on a Zenit-2SB rocket, starting what was meant to be a three-year voyage. The craft is insured only up to 1.2 billion roubles ($40 million), Marinin said.