Did U.S. radar fry Russian Mars probe? MOSCOW - Russian space officials are speculating that American radar may have zapped the failed Mars moon probe that fell into the ocean Sunday, a prominent Russia newspaper said Tuesday. Russia has been trying to explain the spectacular and humiliating failure of the Phobos-Gunt probe ever since it got into trouble soon after its Nov. 9 launch. Tuesday, the authoritative Kommersant newspaper, quoting an unnamed source, said a commission investigating the failure was considering whether the spacecraft was damaged shortly after the launch by flying through powerful radar signals from a U.S. installation in the Marshall Islands, which was tracking an asteroid. "There is a possibility that the station accidentally entered the area covered by the radar, which resulted in a failure of its electronics caused by a megawatt impulse," a space industry source said, according to Kommersant. After that, it could no longer give a command to switch on the Phobos propelling system. The United States has come in for a lot of blame here recently: some government officials have accused it of paying the demonstrators who turned out to protest the December elections. If American radar signals actually did harm the Phobus-Grunt, it was presumably unintentional. Earlier, the head of the Roscosmos space agency, Vladimir Popovkin, said the spacecraft, which stopped responding to commands on its second orbit of the Earth, might have been damaged by "a foreign technical facility." The Kommersant report said experts first thought an onboard computer had malfunctioned, but later ruled that out because the solar batteries were turned on normally. So the suspicion turned to a possible short circuit. Investigators said they would use a model of the Phobos probe to test whether radiation could have damaged it, the RIA Novosti news service said Tuesday. "The results of the experiment will allow us to prove or dismiss the possibility of the radars" impact," said Yuri Koptev, the former head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, who is directing the investigation. Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian deputy prime minister who said he would personally oversee the investigation, said on Tuesday he did not rule out the possibility of U.S. radar interference--even though so far there is no proof. Bloggers quickly began demanding to know why Russia's space agency would have launched the probe into an orbit that passed through U.S. radar.