On this day in space! March 27, 1989: Phobos 2 mission to Mars moon ends in failure

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On March 27, 1989, the Soviet Union's Phobos 2 mission to Mars' moons ended in failure.

On March 27, 1989, the Soviet Union's Phobos 2 mission to Mars' moons ended in failure. But the whole mission was definitely not a failure.

Phobos 2 arrived in Mars orbit two months earlier and had been studying Mars and Phobos, the larger of the planet's two moons. During that time, it beamed 37 pictures of Phobos back to Earth.

A scale model of a Phobos probe like the type launched on Phobos 2, the last planetary mission launched by the Soviet Union. (Image credit: Museum of Cosmonautics)
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For the final phase of its mission, the spacecraft was getting ready to drop off two small landers on Phobos. One lander was actually something called a "hopper" that could move around on the moon's surface.

As Phobos 2 made its way over to Phobos to deploy the landers, mission control suddenly lost contact with it, and the mission was lost. The cause of this failure was determined to be a computer error.

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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