Gotta love the reporting angle - it's not that Russians launched a Mars moon lander for crissake, the first major space exploration project for them in ages, but it's that they screwed up. Yay.

From the article: It is arguably the most challenging unmanned interplanetary mission ever.

Risk v Reward

Well what other reporting angle are you hoping for? They can hardly have an article which leads off with the launch and then mentions in paragraph eleven that "Oh, by the way, it's stuck in Earth orbit and will probably never get anywhere near Mars, sorry"

On the other hand, it's a bit sad that there was barely any coverage of this prior to the launch. I'd heard of the lander, but had no idea it was scheduled for launch this year, let alone this week.

Here's hoping they fix it.

There are a couple tons of hydrazine in the vehicle. That's very newsworthy by itself.

Not that Russia screwing up a Mars missions should be newsworthy anyway.

Care to elaborate?

Russia has a very long history of failed Mars missions:

http://flowingdata.com/2009/10/26/failed-space-missions-to-m...

Of the 20 missions launched by USSR/Russia so far (not counting Phobos-Grunt), 14 were absolute failures that didn't make it to Mars or return any data. 2 of the remaining 6 were orbiter-lander missions, and the lander either burned up in entry (Mars 2) or went silent after only 20 seconds of data on the ground (Mars 3). Their orbiters sent back around 60 images though, so they can be considered marginal successes. Mars 4 failed to achieve orbit, but somehow gets counted as a success by people who tally these things because they still managed to do at least some science as it zipped by. Mars 6 ceased transmission after 224 seconds, and what data it did send was near-useless due to degradation in the electronics. The last "successful" mission sent by the Soviets was Phobos 2 in 1988. It got some great data on the way in, but contact was lost as it approached it's ultimate target, Phobos.

Mars 5 was the only hands-down, unqualified success of the entire program.

(The only post-Soviet Russian mission to Mars, Mars 96, is counted among the 14 failures).

14 failures, 5 marginal "successes", and only 1 mission that achieved its objectives completely.

I hope the people down-voting me didn't think I was being prejudiced or something. It's just the simple truth: with the Soviet/Russian Mars program, failure is the expected outcome.

If Phobos-Grunt is lost, I would be greatly saddened, but hardly surprised.

Russian sources [1][2] don't tell us much more besides that the error is probably in software, the people responsible are preparing for the worst-case scenario and that the damage to the budget is in ballpark of $160MM (of which ~$40MM are insured).

[1] http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/1812141

[2] http://www.vedomosti.ru/newsline/news/1415670/situaciya_s_fo...

A few years ago a satellite was falling to earth[1], and although it supposedly had much less dangerous materials onboard than this thing, every nation was hurrying to blow it out of the sky. And eventually they did. Why can't they do that with this one when it falls ?

[1] http://articles.cnn.com/2008-02-19/tech/satellite.shootdown_...

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2010-07/19/content_101211...

You have confused "what a national defense agency has said their reason for doing something is" with "why they are actually doing something".

The stated reason is not terribly compelling. Deorbiting satellites are very small, the Earth is very large. As the article correct points out, nobody has ever been injured by space debris, or even killed. Dozens of people are killed by cars every day, yet each automobile fatality does not make it into the New York Times.

Note the timeline of the two ASAT tests. China shoots down a satellite in January. One month later, the United States does the same thing, presumably in response. Why are the Chinese shooting down satellites?

A critically important piece of context is that China really, really hates satellite-guided bombs, such as the American JDAM. This is because the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was hit by five JDAMs during the 1999 NATO operation in Yugoslavia, killing three people, and injuring twenty others.[1]

The American position is that this was a simple mistake in targeting, as they were attempting to strike a Yugoslavian arms warehouse 180 metres away. The Chinese maintain the Bill Clinton personally ordered the attack, possibly while drinking the blood of Chinese infants, as a part of his mad genocidal urge to destroy the entire Chinese race. (The reaction of the Chinese media to the bombing was remarkably hysterical; it's essentially their 9/11, only they didn't have the option of invading the US)

Various cynical independents have pointed out that, five weeks earlier, the Yugoslavians had actually managed to shoot down a F-117, the only combat loss ever sustained by a stealth aircraft, and that the Chinese had been seen buying recovered debris from locals. You could make an amazing jump in deduction here, and conclude that they had been storing debris in their embassy, in the hopes that the Americans wouldn't bomb it in retaliation.

The JDAM depends on GPS satellites, which have to be in a fairly low orbit, for accuracy, and so that the receivers can use small antennas; where they are fairly vulnerable to ASAT missiles. (I don't believe any current ground-based ASAT missiles can hit targets in geosynchronous orbit, which is 15,000 kilometres higher than MEO. This is an educated guess, not a certainty: governments are chary about giving out details on the performance envelope of missiles.)

An ASAT weapon isn't something you want to use at the drop of a hat. Blowing something up in orbit produces a lot of debris, most of which hangs out in space for years. There's various doomsday scenarios, of varying plausibility, where blowing up a satellite produces high-velocity shrapnel which destroys other satellites, which in turn fragment, producing a cascade of destruction, throwing us back into the stone age.

In conclusion, you can blow it up, but you probably don't want to.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._bombing_of_the_Chinese_emb...

I am not sure, what point you are trying to prove, but there is a Chinese satellite YH-1 [1] onboard of Fobos-Grunt.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinghuo-1

This is really sad, and I hope that they ultimately regain control of it.

However... in my mind, it raises some serious questions about Russia's ability to safely ferry US astronauts into space over the next few years.

I don't think that it should. This was a completely different stack than what the Russians use for launching people, the Russian manned mission success rate is damned impressive, and the US has had a fair number of their own failed probes.

It's oddly satisfying to see the word "stack" used so literally on a website where most news is software-related.

That's a good point... I do forget, manned vs. robotic are two completely different ball games.

That and the launch system to LEO worked perfectly. It's the probe/upper stage that failed.

> Russia's ability to safely ferry US astronauts into space over the next few years

Nothing to do with each other. The Russian success rate with low to mid earth orbit[1] is much, much better than NASA's[2]. Soyuz is the most reliable, and probably the cheapest, way to get a payload or people into earth orbit[3].

The shuttle was a disaster. Over-engineered, too expensive and not safe. The Russian technology (both capsule and boosters) which was a decade older proved in the long term to be more practical in every way.

And NASA has also had its share of problems with missions to Mars.

[1] only Soyuz 11 failed, cabin depressurization on return, since 1967, out of 112. 40+ years now since the last failure.

[2] 135 launches, two failures, too many delays and other problems to count

[3] http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Delta_Mission/SEM8XK57ESD_0.html

I sure hope it doesn't crash. Hydrazine is not nice stuff.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hydrazine

Even if it never heads off to Mars, if they can just get it into a stable orbit, having all of that fuel up there could come in handy later.

Without power to fire the maneuvering thrusters its orbit will probably degrade fairly rapidly. Also, it's probably more expensive to get the fuel out during a complicated docking operation than it is to just get up new fuel for new missions as needed.

This sucks. It would have been a very cool mission.

The engines failed to fire. All those fuels are not being used. The probe is circling the Earth on inertia. After a while without power the orbit will deteriorate.

Hope they can get the engine to fire before it's too late.

It would clarify headlines like this if there was a different name for Earth's moon. Thoughts like "I thought its name was Lunkhod or something, not Mars" filled my head until reading this was a mission to Phobos.

> It would clarify headlines like this if there was a different name for Earth's moon.

What about Luna?

That's just "moon" in another language. If you rename Earth's moon you're just shifting the problem into the Romance languages.

The only problem is one of ambiguity. So long as each language has their own convention to resolve that ambiguity, there's no problem.

Not all languages use the same names for stuff, after all. Abroad, the USA may be called les États-Unis d'Amérique, アメリカ, or a great many other things. And we use our own names for other countries that they don't use for themselves.

I'd prefer if headlines weren't capitalised. The Moon is pretty unique, it's Earth's moon.

But then why do you call it "Earth" instead of "Planet"?

Mostly because we'd had the words "Earth" and "Planet" for a helluva long time before we realised that the Earth was a planet.

The sense of "Earth" which came first was the sense of "soil", so our planet is really just called "Soil". It's interesting to think about the process by which our ancestors figured out that "earth" wasn't just the substance underneath their feet, it was also a place.

I often wonder if we'll ever get to call Earth "Terra" like they do TV. ;)

Terra was something the golden age SF writers settled on. It's from the same source (Latin) as the names of the planets and Sol.

Terra is to Earth as Sol is to Sun.

I actually call it Terra. And Sol. And Lua. But that's because I'm Portuguese. :)

Why the hell is "falling stuff from the sky" the new "terror"? Can we please not launch shit into space without knowing where it'll fall? I know it's hard, but it's not impossibru!

To say that calculating the trajectories of decaying orbits around earth is hard is kind of an understatement. There are too many factors, you have to remember we're basically talking the air resistance of a possibly tumbling abstract shape that will soon be tumbling rather chaotically once any appreciable atmospheric effects take place. And that's just the start.

No cone of uncertainty?

Picture this: an 11 ton tank of gas falls into your house and burns it to the ground, and all you're told is: "There are too many factors, you have to remember we're basically talking [about] the air resistance of a possibly tumbling abstract shape that [was] tumbling rather chaotically [when] any appreciable atmospheric effects [were taking] place. And that's just the start".

I'm sorry you don't like it, but it's a fact. Predicting orbital decay to such accuracy is simply impossible.

In no part of that picture does the reality of the situation change.