After more than a week of unsuccessful attempts to communicate with Russia’s Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, the European Space Agency (ESA) has ceased relaying orbit-raising commands to the unmanned Mars probe stranded in low Earth orbit since its Nov. 8 launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, according to ESA officials.
“After two days’ attempt at Maspalomas [in the Canary Islands], we did not succeed to get commands into the spacecraft and to get response by telemetry,” said Manfred Warhaut, mission operations chief at ESA, referring to the agency’s ground station in Spain’s Canary Islands. “We have agreed that by the end of today in the absence of any success we would terminate all of our support to the Phobos-Grunt mission.”
Bye bye GRUNT. To read more, click here.