Chance of saving Mars-bound probe ‘slim’

AS Russia’s space agency struggled to fix a probe bound for a moon of Mars that instead got stuck in Earth’s orbit, some experts said the chances of saving the $170 million craft looked slim.

Roscosmos spokesman Alexei Kuznetsov said efforts to communicate with the unmanned Phobos-Grunt (Phobos-Ground) spacecraft hadn’t brought any results yet.

The probe will come crashing down to earth in a couple of weeks if engineers fail to fix the problem.