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By Denise Chow
When an ill-fated Russian Mars probe fell to Earth over the weekend, the spacecraft's untimely demise set off a flurry of conflicting media reports and conspiracy theories.
Russia's Phobos-Grunt space probe suffered a debilitating malfunction shortly after its November 2011 launch, which stranded it in low-Earth orbit for more than two months before it succumbed to gravitational forces and plummeted through the atmosphere on Jan. 15.
The $165 million spacecraft reportedly broke apart over the Pacific Ocean, but inconsistent reports soon surfaced, which sparked different theories about where the probe had landed, and what had caused it to malfunction in the first place.
The Russian Federal Space Agency is notorious for closely controlling any information released, but part of the issue is the tricky nature of calculating re-entry predictions for dead satellites and other pieces of orbital debris.
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