Stations of the European Space Agency located in South America, Australia and the Canary Islands will try on Tuesday night to establish contact with the Phobos-Grunt unmanned spacecraft that is stranded at a low-Earth orbit after launch, the managing directorate of the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
“The ESA team will make the last attempt to establish contact with Phobos-Grunt using the ESA tracking station network ESTRACK,” the official microblog of the directorate said .
Earlier, the stations located in Kourou (French Guiana), in Australia and the Canary Islands tried to receive signals from the apparatus Phobos-Grunt.
The Mars probe lifted off from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan on November 9, but its engines failed to put it on course for the Red Planet. The craft was designed to bring back rock and soil samples from the Martian moon.
