The Moon landing hoax, Planet X, Roswell and now America’s satellite busting radars! In what could be the start of the latest conspiracy theory the head of Russian Technologies has claimed that radiation from American radars could have caused the failure of Phobos-Grunt.

Many of us will be aware of the tragic tale of the Russian probe that tried, a story that had its conclusion just this weekend with the splash landing in the Pacific Ocean. For many weeks people have been trying to figure out what went wrong and why Phobos-Grunt never started its journey to Mars. Launched in November the probe was scheduled to land on the Martian moon of Phobos and return a sample for study on Earth, but the probe never really got out of the gates. Due to a malfunction Phobos-grunt was left stranded in orbit around Earth. Extensive efforts to address the issue and reclaim the mission unfortunately failed and the probe fell to its demise on Sunday plummeting into the Pacific Ocean.

This added to a recent spate of bad luck for the Russians with the failed launch of a Progress supply rocket within the last 3 months and the loss of 5 other satellites this year. As one would imagine frustrations must be running high within the Russian space agency with them at present unable to work out what caused the malfunction. This accusation seems more like a frustrated outburst than a genuine belief in international ‘meddling’. Space engineering professionals the world over can sympathise with the Russians though as around 60% of Martian missions fail to achieve their primary objective. This reputation even resulted in the creation of a fictional monster that lived on Mars subsisting of Martian probes, jokingly called the ‘Great Galactic Ghoul’.

Analysis of the Phobos-Grunt data is still being poured over in an attempt to find out what might have gone wrong so that future missions can be more successful, hopefully this outburst won’t hurt diplomatic relations. In the current financial climate and with the ever increasing cost of space flight and spacecraft engineering international collaboration is vital to ensure productive work is achieved in the space environment.