While the United States celebrated a banner year of Mars exploration (see page 18), Russian scientists were mourning the loss of a $160 million spacecraft designed to retrieve soil from Mars's moon Phobos. The Phobos-Grunt probe plummeted into the Pacific Ocean on January 17, two months after launch. Its upper-stage rockets had failed to fire after its initial ascent, and the craft never left Earth's orbit. Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, initially suggested the mission was sabotaged. Another official claimed a U.S. radar station had disabled the probe.
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