The Near Earth Asteroid 2005 YU 55 passed Earth late this afternoon Mountain Daylight time in the US, and this evening no doubt many amateur and professional astronomers are looking thru eyepieces and making exposures with different types of cameras, hoping to capture images of the asteroid as it passed our planet.
Closer to home the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft made it into low earth parking orbit, but the burn of the upper stage to propel the spacecraft first into an elliptical orbit, then onto a Mars transfer orbit around the sun apparently never took place. Observers in South America reported seeing two separate objects orbiting the Earth, but not in a trans Martian trajectory leaving Earth orbit.
It appears the upper stage, based on the sometime troublesome Fregat liquid fueled system, may have failed to commence or complete its firing to send the spacecraft on its way to Mars. I'll report more when I have more definitive information.
