A blog on the Scientific American website discounts the claims by a retired Russian general that the HAARP project in Alaska had anything to do with the failure of a mission to Mars in early November. The rocket designed to get the spacecraft to Mars did not fire and the machine is stuck in earth's orbit.

It is expected to fall to earth Jan. 9, Scientific American says. The goal had been to send the Phobos-Grunt probe to Mars and back again with soil samples.

There is "little basis for the claim" that the Alaska project near Gakona had anything to do with the failure, writer Jim Nash says.

Craig Selcher, HAARP program manager with the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., tells the Scientific American writer that the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program has not been operating since Sept. 3. Even if it were, HAARP doesn't have the power to disable a satellite.

"The maximum energy that Phobos–Grunt could have felt from HAARP would have equaled a power density of 1.03 milliwatts per square centimeter, according to Selcher. That is like shining a 60-watt lightbulb on the craft from 21 meters, he says. The sun, on the other hand, blasts the top of the atmosphere with an average of 135,100 milliwatts per square centimeter," the blog report states.