A doomed Russian Mars probe that’s been stuck in Earth orbit for two months may finally come crashing down Sunday over the Indian Ocean, Russian space officials say.
The 14.5-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft should fall back to Earth between Saturday and Monday (Jan. 14 to Jan. 16), Russia’s Federal Space Agency, known as Roscosmos, announced in a statement Wednesday.
If Phobos-Grunt comes down at the “central point” in that window — 5:18 a.m. EST on Sunday — it will fall over a stretch of empty ocean west of the Indonesian island of Java, according to a re-entry projection map Roscosmos published with the update.