One day after a Russian Mars probe was left stranded in low Earth orbit, engineers planned to begin trying to save the mission Wednesday in hopes the problem was a relatively simple software glitch. The Phobos-Grunt spacecraft is designed to fly to the Martian moon Phobos, retrieve samples and return them to Earth. Credit: Roscosmos After launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Tuesday, the 29,000-pound Phobos-Grunt spacecraft entered an orbit with a low point of 128 miles and a high point of 216 miles. But the craft's propulsion unit was supposed to fire twice later Tuesday night to raise its altitude and inject the probe on a trajectory toward Mars. Neither firing occurred, leaving...
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