Russia vowed Monday to expose the officials responsible for the failure of a Mars probe the military said crashed into the Pacific Ocean after being stuck in orbit around the Earth for more than two months.
The 13.5-ton Phobos-Grunt probe re-entered Earth's atmosphere late Sunday, apparently crashing into the Pacific, the military said.
It blasted off November 9 on an ambitious mission to collect soil samples from Mars's largest moon, Phobos. But, its booster rockets never triggered and the probe lost contact with ground control and spiraled into an uncontrolled descent.
"I'm taking personal control of the investigation into the reasons for the Phobos-Grunt accident," Russia's former ambassador to NATO and recently appointed Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin wrote on his Twitter account.
Rogozin said he expected the Russian space agency Roscosmos "to name the anti-heroes" responsible for the latest in a series of space failures.
"I am expecting Roscosmos's promised report on the reasons for the accident, the names of the anti-heroes and also its view on the prospects for developing the space sector up to 2030," he wrote.
He added that he would attend a meeting with constructors on January 31.
A lack of information about what happened on board is likely to hamper investigators in pinning down the cause of the failure, a source in the space industry told the Interfax News Agency. "There is practically no telemetric information from onboard the craft. There is also not enough supporting evidence to draw a picture of what happened on board."
Russia's space agency has said it believes fragments of the probe crashed Sunday into the Pacific Ocean, however, the exact location where the probe crashed remained unclear.
"According to information from mission control of the military space forces, the fragments of Phobos Grunt should have fallen into the Pacific Ocean at 17:45 GMT," space forces spokesman Alexei Zolotukhin told Interfax on Sunday.
However, the deputy space agency chief Anatoly Shilov said in televised comments Monday the agency expected the probe to fall on Brazil, although it had no witness accounts or other evidence.
AFP