Fobos-Grunt also carried the Chinese Mars orbiter Yinghuo-1 and the tiny Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment funded by the Planetary Society.

[4][5] It was launched on 8 November 2011, at 20:16 UTC, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, but subsequent rocket burns intended to set the craft on a course for Mars failed, leaving it stranded in low Earth orbit.

[6][7] Efforts to reactivate the craft were unsuccessful, and it fell back to Earth in an uncontrolled re-entry on 15 January 2012, over the Pacific Ocean, west of Chile.

According to lead scientist Alexander Zakharov, the entire spacecraft and most of the instruments were new, though the designs drew upon the nation's legacy of three successful Luna missions, which in the 1970s retrieved a few hundred grams of Moon rocks.

Space center researchers expected to use photographs and data to study the magnetic field of Mars and the interaction between ionospheres, escape particles and solar wind.

The experiment would have tested one aspect of transpermia, the hypothesis that life could survive space travel, if protected inside rocks blasted by impact off one planet to land on another.

While the Moscow-based company Tehkhom provided the computer hardware on time, the internal NPO Lavochkin team responsible for integration and software development fell behind schedule.

During the extra development time resulting from the delay, a Polish-built drill was added to the Phobos lander as a back-up soil extraction device.

According to original plans, Mars orbit arrival had been expected during September 2012 and the return vehicle was scheduled to reach Earth in August 2014.

[citation needed] Moreover, Roscosmos's top officials believed Fobos-Grunt to be functional, stably oriented and charging batteries through its solar panels.

[53] The European Space Agency decided to end the efforts to contact the probe on 2 December 2011, with one analyst saying that Fobos-Grunt appeared "dead in the water".

[17] NASA veteran James Oberg said the hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide "could freeze before ultimately entering", thus contaminating the impact area.

[7] Meanwhile, the head of Roscosmos said the probability of parts reaching the Earth surface was "highly unlikely" and that the spacecraft, including the LIFE module and the Yinghuo-1 orbiter, would be destroyed during re-entry.

[17] Russian military sources claimed that Fobos-Grunt was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and South America when it re-entered the atmosphere at about 17:45 UTC.

In contrast, Russian civilian ballistic experts said that the fragments had fallen over a broader patch of Earth's surface, and that the midpoint of the crash zone was located in the Goiás state of Brazil.

On 17 January 2012, an unidentified Russian official speculated that a U.S. radar stationed on the Marshall Islands may have inadvertently disabled the probe, but cited no evidence.

[61] Popovkin suggested the microchips may have been counterfeit,[62][63] then he announced on 1 February 2012 that a burst of cosmic radiation may have caused computers to reboot and go into a standby mode.

[66] On 6 February 2012, the commission investigating the mishap concluded that Fobos-Grunt mission failed because of "a programming error which led to a simultaneous reboot of two working channels of an onboard computer".

[67][68] Although the specific failure was identified, experts suggest it was the culmination of poor quality control,[69][70] lack of testing,[71] security issues and corruption.

[78][79] Popovkin declared that they would soon attempt to repeat the Fobos-Grunt mission, if an agreement was not reached for Russian co-operation in the European Space Agency's ExoMars program.

[citation needed] However, since an agreement was reached for the inclusion of Russia as a full project partner,[80] some instruments originally developed for Fobos-Grunt were flown in the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.

[82][83] In August 2015, the ESA-Roscosmos working group on post-ExoMars cooperation, completed a joint study for a possible future Phobos sample return mission, preliminary discussions were held,[84][85] and in May 2015 the Russian Academy of Sciences submitted a budget proposal.

It was imperative to prevent the introduction to Mars of contaminants from Earth; according to Fobos-Grunt Chief Designer Maksim Martynov, the probability of the probe accidentally reaching the surface of Mars was much lower than the maximum specified for Category III missions, the type assigned to Fobos-Grunt and defined in COSPAR's planetary protection policy (in accordance with Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty).

An emergency mode existed for the case of communications breakdown, which enabled the lander to automatically launch the return rocket to deliver the samples to Earth.

[100] The samples would be loaded into a capsule which would then be moved inside a special pipeline into the descent module by inflating an elastic bag within the pipe with gas.

In order to avoid harming the experiments remaining at the lander, the return stage would have ignited its engine once the vehicle had been vaulted to a safe height by springs.

[94] Following the aerodynamic braking to 30 m/s (98 ft/s) the conical descent vehicle would perform a hard landing without a parachute within the Sary Shagan test range in Kazakhstan.

[103] Russia and Ukraine agreed in late October 2010 that the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, would have controlled the probe.