We here at The Atlantic Wire were kind of eagerly anticipating learning where that falling Russian space probe would crash-land this week... only to be massively disappointed that the Russian space agency Roscosmos lost track of where it landed. Imagine our letdown when we read from the AP this morning that "Russian officials say they still have no firm information where a failed Mars moon probe plummeted to Earth, the day after it went down." This of course after The New York Times hyperbolically reported that the probe would land "along a vast stretch of the Earth’s surface that includes the cities of New York, London and Tokyo." (A "vast stretch" that also includes a lot of ocean.) All we get is some wonky details about how computer models predict the probe may have broken up over Brazil with fragments landing off the coast of Chile and news that no eye witnesses have come forward to testify to the (we assume action-movie-like) impact of the probe. It's a bit of Cold War schadenfreude at another failure of the Russian space program -- except that unlike during the Cold War NASA now actually depends on them to reach the International Space Station. Sigh.
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