Article Posted on : - Jan 16, 2012

MOSCOW (AP): A Russian space probe designed to boost the nation's pride on a bold mission to a moon of Mars came down in flames on Sunday, showering fragments into the south Pacific west of Chile's coast, officials said.

Pieces from the Phobos-Grunt, which had become stuck in Earth's orbit, landed in water 1,250 kilometers west of Wellington Island in Chile's south, the Russian military Air and Space Defense Forces said in a statement carried by the country's news agencies.

The military space tracking facilities were monitoring the probe's crash, its spokesman Col. Alexei Zolotukhin said.

Zolotukhin said the deserted ocean area is where Russia guides its discarded space cargo ships serving the International Space Station.

RIA Novosti news agency, however, cited Russian ballistic experts who said the fragments fell over a broader patch of Earth's surface, spreading from the Atlantic and including the territory of Brazil.

It said the midpoint of the crash zone was located in the Brazilian state of Goias.

The USD 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.

The Phobos-Grunt was designed to travel to one of Mars' twin moons, Phobos, land on it, collect soil samples and fly them back to Earth in 2014 in one of the most daunting interplanetary missions ever.

It got stranded in Earth's orbit after its Nov. 9 launch, and efforts by Russian and European Space Agency experts to bring it back to life failed.