MOSCOW - Russia has launched an unmanned probe on a daring mission to reach Phobos, a moon of Mars, and to fly samples of its soil back to Earth.
The Phobos-Grount (Phobos-Soil) craft was successfully launched by a Zenit-2 booster rocket at 12:16 a.m. Moscow time Wednesday (2016 GMT Tuesday) from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It will take the robotic probe a few hours to conduct a series of preliminary manoeuvrs before it can shoot off to the Red Planet.
The return vehicle is expected to carry up to 200 grams of soil from Phobos back to Earth in August 2014.
The $170 million endeavour would be Russia's first interplanetary mission since the Soviet times. A previous 1996 robotic mission to Mars ended in failure when the probe crashed in the Pacific following an engine failure.
