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A coordinated global campaign is monitoring a wayward Russian Mars probe that's slated to crash to Earth in the next few days, the European Space Agency has announced. The doomed Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, which Russian officials estimate will re-enter Earth's atmosphere between Saturday and Monday, is now officially a target for the 12-member Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, or IADC for short. "An IADC re-entry prediction campaign is ongoing since Jan. 2. Phobos-Grunt was identified to be no high-risk object," said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the space debris office at the European Space Agency's (ESA) European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt,...

A Russian scientific spacecraft whizzing out of control around the Earth, and expected to re-enter the atmosphere on Saturday, may have failed because it was struck by some type of antisatellite weapon, the director of Russia’s space agency said in an interview published Tuesday. He did not say who would want to interfere with the spacecraft, which was intended to explore a moon of Mars. The Russian craft, named Phobos-Grunt for the moon and the Russian word for ground, ran into trouble soon after it was launched in November, when its rockets failed to lift it out of low Earth...

Where and when re-entry would occur will not be known until a few days before the event, but the spacecraft is expected to arrive between January 6 and January 19. The landing zone has been calculated between latitude 51.4-N to 51.4-S, which includes the cities of London and Paris.

A skywatcher has photographed a troubled Russian Mars probe that remains stuck in Earth orbit three weeks after its launch. Astrophotographer and veteran satellite spotter Ralf Vandebergh tracked Russia's Phobos-Grunt spacecraft as it passed over the southern Netherlands on Tuesday. Using a 10-inch (25-centimeter) telescope and a video camera, he snapped a series of images at a range of about 170 miles (274 kilometers). "It was bright in my tracking scope, I think it was clearly visible (to the) naked-eye as well with sun at -6 degrees," Vandebergh told Space.com in an email. "Striking was a kind of reddish-yellowish color...

Dr. David Warmflash, principal science lead for the US team from the LIFE experiment on board the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, provides an update for Universe Today on the likelihood of saving the mission. The Phobos-Grunt probe is still stuck in orbit around Earth. However, periodically the spacecraft experiences a mysterious slight boost in its orbit. Following the first episode where this occurred, commentators speculated as to the cause. The activation of the spacecraft’s thrusters – the small engines that are designed to steer the craft and make small adjustments – was an obvious answer. Is spacecraft trying to save itself? The...