UPDATE: With the last orbital elements decay prediction is now january 15, 2012 at 18h27 UTC +/-4h

Thirteen tons of space ship once destine for the planet Mars is starting to lose altitude, and may drop into the thicker layer of the atmosphere and (mostly) burn up Sunday (story at bbc). The Russian space agency estimates that about 200 kilograms will make it to the ground. It is impossible to predict this far in advance where any of that might fall.

You can track Phobos-Grunt here, but that tracking tool does not give you the location of the object; It shows you where it should be based on calculations. Once Phobos-Grunt starts to interact with the thicker atmosphere and, perhaps, bits and chunks start to fall off, the trajectory will probably change and this tracking map will no longer be that useful, and probably won’t tell you if the space craft has crashed yet.

The original mission is described as follows:

Fobos-Grunt or Phobos-Grunt… was an attempted Russian sample return mission to Phobos, one of the moons of Mars. Fobos-Grunt also carried the Chinese Mars orbiter Yinghuo-1 and the tiny Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment funded by the Planetary Society.*

The space ship made it into earth orbit, but for unknown reasons, a booster designed to push the craft towards the Red Planet failed to fire. This of course makes this re-entry interesting in a novel way: Since the booster didn’t fire, there’s about 10 tons of rocket fuel in aluminum tanks on Phobos-Grunt. It is assumed the tanks will melt quickly and the fuel will burn or explode.

I wonder if this will make re-entry more visible than otherwise?

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
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