Moscow/Washington:
Russia's failed Phobos-Grunt Mars probe spacecraft will likely plunge back to Earth between Jan 15 and Jan 16, reports Xinhua.
The 14-tonne spacecraft that carries 11 tonnes of toxic rocket fuel, would fall into the Atlantic Ocean.
Most of it will burn up in the atmosphere, but 20 to 30 chunks of charred debris, weighing about 200 kg, could make it to the surface, while the toxic fuel would burn in the atmosphere at a height of about 100 km, said Roscosmos. Just where it might crash will not be clear until just hours before it actually happens.
In the US, researchers said the spacecraft would re-enter the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean, east of Argentina, and the debris would fall between 02:39 GMT Jan 15 and 07:39 GMT Jan 16, according to the ABC News.
But US researchers also agreed there is no way to control or predict the exact location where the spacecraft would come down.
Phobos Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary mission in decades tasked to explore one of Mars' two moons, was launched Nov 9 but got stuck in Earth orbit due to propulsion failure and radio contact was lost.
The world's space agencies agreed that any one person's chances of getting hit by debris are tiny -- something like 1 in 20 trillion, based on the spacecraft's orbit and the amount of debris that might survive re-entry. The chances that of the 7 billion people on Earth, one of them, somewhere, could be hit are more like 1 in 3,000.