Did Bad Memory Chips Down Russia's Mars Probe?

The failure of Russia’s ambitious Phobos-Grunt space mission has been shrouded in confusion and mystery—from the first inklings of trouble after its November launch to inconsistent reports of where it fell to Earth in January, and beyond. The release of the official accident investigation results on 3 February served only to further rumors of fundamental hardware and software design flaws, and of blatant violations of safety standards. The report blames the loss of the probe primarily on memory chips that became fatally damaged by cosmic rays. But observers place the blame squarely on the engineers who put Phobos-Grunt together, noting that if these military-grade chips (which were not radiation hardened) had been proposed for a critical component in a space-probe design for the U.S. space program, they probably would not have been approved for use. Worse still for Russia’s space agency are  reports suggesting that the chips were counterfeits that had been intentionally misrepresented as offering higher performance than they were actually capable of ...