Russia's Phobos-Grunt probe which was supposed to land in Mars moon Phobos has come crashing back to Earth Sunday 1,250 kilometers (775 miles) west of Wellington Island in Chile's south, space officials said.

"Phobos-Grunt fragments have crashed down in the Pacific Ocean," Col. Alexi Zolotukhin, a spokesman for Russia's aerospace defense forces, told news services. Re-entry was estimated to occur at about 12:45 p.m. ET, based on the data received by the Russians.

ESA and various other space agencies has been closely monitoring the spacecraft's re-entry, but so far there were no reports of injury or damage.

Earlier, rumors the probe may have crashed landed in the west Queensland town of Charleville began circulating late yesterday after a light airplane pilot reported seeing something fall from the sky.

According to the report, the pilot radioed his sighting to an air traffic controller, who checked to make sure no airborne planes were missing. Although no reports were received by Air Services Australia, the agency still contacted Australian Search and Rescue, and advised the Defence Force's Joint Operations Command.

The unmanned Phobos-Grunt probe, which weighed 14.9 tons that included a load of 11 metric tons (12 tons) of highly toxic rocket fuel, was one of the heaviest and most toxic space derelicts ever to crash to Earth.

Russia's space agency Roscosmos predicted that only between 20 and 30 fragments of the Phobos probe with a total weight of up to 200 kilograms (440 pounds) would survive the re-entry and plummet to Earth and that all of the fuel will burn up on re-entry.

The Phobos-Grunt was designed to travel to one of Mars' twin moons, Phobos, and collect soil samples. The spacecraft also carried a small cylinder with a collection of microbes as part of an experiment by the Pasadena, California-based Planetary Society that designed to explore whether they can survive interplanetary travel.

The doomed Mars probe got stranded in Earth's orbit after its Nov. 9 launch, and efforts by Russian and European Space Agency experts to bring it back to life failed.
Russia launched the doomed Phobos-Grunt research probe, the most expensive and the most ambitious space mission since Soviet times, in an attempt to reinvigorate its interplanetary program which had not seen a successful mission since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Vitaly Davydov, deputy head of Roscosmos was earlier quoted to say that because of the failed probe, Russia may just focus on sending probes to the Earth's moon and researching on Mars in cooperation with its international partners in the future.