Russia Mars probe 'isn't lost, could re-enter Earth'

Washington, November 15 (ANI): Russian officials still insist that their Phobos-Grunt Mars probe is not lost, but conceded that it could re-enter earth's atmosphere.

Phobos-Grunt was to visit a moon of Mars but it is stuck in orbit around the Earth and could burn up when it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere in January, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

"The probe is going to be in orbit until January, but in the first days of December the window will close to re-program it," Discovery News quoted Vladimir Popovkin, General Director of Roscosmos, as saying at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhistan.

"There is little chance that it would ever reach Earth (surface) at all... We have no doubt that it will burn up on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere," he said.

However, Popovkin admitted that the agency still didn't have the telemetric information to understand what went wrong even as anonymous sources were quoted as saying that the probe should be 'considered lost'. (ANI)