Foreign Sabotage Suspected in Phobos-Grunt Meltdown

Source: The Register
Brid-Aine Parnell

Russian space chief doesn't want to point any fingers, but...

The head of the Russian space agency has hinted that foreign sabotage might be to blame for the malfunction of the country's Martian space probe, Phobos-Grunt.

Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin told Russian newspaper Izvestia (in Russian, translation by Google Translate) that he had no complete explanation for the frequent failures of the agency's space projects, but he suggested Russia might not be entirely to blame.

"Today there is no clarity, why the propulsion unit onboard Phobos-Grunt failed to start," he said.

"It is also unclear, why our satellites often have failures at the time when they fly out of range [of Russian mission control] where we don't see the vehicle and do not receive telemetry from it. I don’t want to make any accusations, but today there is powerful equipment to influence spacecrafts, and the possibility of their use should not be ruled out,” he added.

Cosmic Sabotage? Phobos-Grunt Probe Mysteriously Disabled

Source: Activist Post
Andrew W. Griffin

We have been watching the drama involving the ailing Russian Phobos-Grunt (a.k.a Fobos-Grunt or “Phobos-soil") spacecraft with great interest, as the probe appears to be stranded in Earth orbit, likely to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and burn up, perhaps as soon as next month.

In fact, latest reports on the $170 million Phobos-Grunt craft suggest that Russian scientists "have given up on any hope of regaining even minimal control" over the probe and that it is likely breaking apart, if reports from the U.S. Army Strategic Command, as reported today in The Moscow Times, are accurate.

Launched on Nov. 9 (11/9/11) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Phobos-Grunt was designed to take a trip to the potato-shaped Martian moon of Phobos where it would take samples of its soil and return to Earth in 2014. It would have been the first spacecraft On board was China’s first Mars probe, Yinghuo-1. It was rocketed into low-Earth orbit and two thrusters that would have sent it on its way to Phobos failed to operate.

And now that it is expected to crash back to Earth, there is concern about the highly toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide onboard. But it is simply expected to burn up before hitting Earth. 

So what caused the Phobos-Grunt to fail? It’s not really clear. Speculation, conspiracy theories and more have been offered up. After all, it is Phobos that had former NASA astronaut and Moon landing hero Buzz Aldrin publicly talking about the mysteries of Phobos, one of Mars's two moons, the other being Deimos.

Said Aldrin on C-SPAN in July 2009: “…(V)isit the moon of Mars. There's a monolith there - a very unusual structure on this little potato-shaped object (Phobos) that goes around Mars once every seven hours.When people find out about that they are going to say, ‘Who put that there? Who put that there?’ Well, uh, the universe put it there, or if you choose, God put it there.”

Many Astrophysicists claim Phobos is artificial

And photos do seem to show an unusual structure on the surface of the curious little moonlet.

Meanwhile, the Russians are extremely upset about this latest failure and are looking for someone to blame. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, according to the British news site The Week, “has threatened severe punishment for anyone found responsible for the failure of the … Phobos-Grunt.”

Medvedev was quoted in a Nov. 26, 2011 Reuters report that the Phobos-Grunt failure and another recent disaster involving a cargo ship, taking food and fuel to the International Space Station, are embarrassing to Russia’s space program, Roscosmos, and that if it was sabotaged somehow or simply put together in a sloppy or careless way, they will pay for what they have done.

Medvedev said: “I am not suggesting putting them up against the wall like under Josef Vissarionovich (Stalin), but seriously punish either financially or, if the fault is obvious, it could be a disciplinary or even criminal punishment.”

Russian news network, RT, offered a report titled “Did U.S. ‘climate weapon’ knock-out Russian probe?”

An interesting idea. It quotes General-Lieutenant Nikolay Rodionov who suggests that the HAARP station in Alaska – officially reported to “study … the ionosphere and its use for communication” – gave off “powerful electromagnetic radiation” and may have “affected the control system of the interplanetary probe.”