Mystery persists over Russian spacecraft fall site
Russian officials say they still have no firm information where a failed Mars moon probe plummeted
to Earth, the day after it went down.
The unmanned Phobos-Ground probe fell Sunday after being stuck in Earth's orbit for two months.
The $170 million craft was one of the heaviest and most toxic pieces of space junk ever to crash
to Earth, but space officials and experts said the risks posed by its crash were minimal because
the toxic rocket fuel on board and most of the craft's structure would burn up in the atmosphere
high above the ground anyway.
News agencies had cited Defense Ministry spokesman Alexei Zolotukhin as saying Sunday that
fragments of the craft fell in the Pacific Ocean off Chile's coast. But Zolotukhin told The
Associated Press Monday that estimate was based on calculations, and no witness reports had
been received.
The deputy head of Russia’s space agency, Anatoly Shilov, told state news channel Vesti that
agency data assumed the craft broke up somewhere over Brazil.
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