Phobos-Grunt

Phobos-Grunt, Russian spacecraft that was designed to land on the Martian moon Phobos and bring some of its soil back to Earth. It launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Zenit-2 launch vehicle on November 9, 2011. However, Phobos-Grunt (Russian for “Phobos soil”) did not fire its rockets to leave Earth orbit. Subsequent attempts to communicate with the spacecraft were only sporadically successful, and Phobos-Grunt was expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere in early...