Russia hints at U.S. radar role in Mars probe’s crash

MOSCOW — Russian space officials are speculating that American radar may have zapped the failed Mars moon probe that fell into the ocean Sunday, a prominent Russian newspaper said Tuesday.

In Washington, NASA rejected the theory.

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Russia has been trying to explain the spectacular and humiliating failure of the Phobos-Grunt probe ever since it got into trouble soon after its Nov. 9 launch.

On Tuesday, the authoritative Kommersant newspaper, quoting an unnamed individual, said a commission investigating the failure was considering whether the spacecraft was damaged by flying through powerful radar signals from a U.S. installation in the Marshall Islands that was alleged to be tracking an asteroid.

“There is a possibility that the station accidentally entered the area covered by the radar, which resulted in a failure of its electronics caused by a megawatt impulse,” an individual with the space industry said, according to Kommersant. “After that, it could no longer give a command to switch on the Phobos propelling system.”

Bob Jacobs, a NASA spokesman, said NASA scientists were not using the Marshall Islands radar on Nov. 9 to track an asteroid, as suggested by Russian space officials. Instead, the agency employed radar stations only in California and Puerto Rico, he said.

Outside experts called the theory unlikely. “It’s not radar,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and president of the Mars Society. If radar could disable spacecraft, Zubrin said, “satellites would be dying all the time because they constantly pass over radar stations,” he said.

Zubrin pointed instead to problems inside the Russia space industry. “It’s slipshod quality control. Every one of their Mars probes has failed.”

On Tuesday evening, Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted another unnamed Russian official who blamed the crash on “a software mistake and ensuing steps by ground services, which ran the batteries down completely.”

The person quoted — a member of the investigative commission, according to Interfax — said the main computer was overloaded and malfunctioned, preventing the spacecraft from reaching the orbit that would put it on course to Mars. Controllers tried to switch on the deep-space communications transmitter, the individual said, because the spacecraft did not have a close-range transmitter on board.

“This transmitter, consuming a lot of power, worked for a long time and discharged the batteries, but the ground services still failed to contact the spacecraft due to a high speed with which it was flying over ground stations,” the individual told Interfax. “The situation was further complicated by the fact that the spacecraft was in the shade for a long time and could not recharge its batteries.” Once the batteries were drained, the problems could not be fixed. That theory contradicted part of the account in Kommersant, which said experts had determined that the spacecraft’s solar batteries were turned on normally.

The idea of foreign interference was first floated by the head of the Roscosmos space agency, Vladimir Popovkin, who said last week that the probe might have been damaged by “a foreign technical facility.” The craft stopped responding to commands on its second orbit of Earth.