Space radiation most likely caused the demise of a Russian Mars probe that got stuck in Earth orbit shortly after launch and ultimately crashed back to the surface earlier this month, Russia's Federal Space Agency chief said today (Jan. 31), according to media reports.
Russian space chief Vladimir Popovkin said that an investigation pointed to cosmic radiation as the likely culprit in the failure of the Phobos-Grunt mission, but also suggested that an imported spacecraft component may not have been adequately hardened for the harsh radiation environment in space, reported the Associated Press.
"Two components of the onboard computer system were spontaneously rebooted and it switched into a standby mode," Popovkin said in a televised remark, according to the Russian news service Ria Novosti. "The most likely reason [for the glitch] is the impact of heavy charged space particles."
Russia's Phobos-Grunt space probe malfunctioned shortly after its November 2011 launch, preventing it from continuing on toward Mars.
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