Not sure if this is the best place to bring it up but I'm a little confused by the article, specifically the translation. Fobos is not the name of the martian moon, it's Phobos. The Russian letter "ф" is pronounced similarly to "f," but we're not talking about some place called Fobos, we're talking about the Martian moon Phobos. A nitpicky point perhaps but I disagree that Roscosmos has been mistranslating the name of the mission.
Also, according to the Space Review (http://thespacereview.com/article/1966/1) Phobos-Grunt "is the heaviest solar system explorer ever (more than twice the second-heaviest, Cassini).", not just the heaviest built in the former USSR.
There's a confusion here between translation and transliteration.
If you want to TRANSLATE the probe's name, you should say "Phobos-Ground" or "Phobos-Soil". And you should refer to the Union-TM spaceship docking with the Star module, not the Soyuz-TM docking with Zvezda, etc...
but in TRANSLITERATION, which we normally do for names, it is useful to have a fixed mapping between the two alphabets (in this case Cyrillic and Roman) - this helps because if a reader knows both they can more reliably guess what the original Cyrillic was. Mapping the Russian letter Ф to the English letter F, rather than Ph, is a common choice - either would do as long as you are consistent, but in most Western space historiography we've picked F.
It's a Russian space probe, so I prefer to render the Russian spelling as best
I can. Now when I talk about the moon of Mars, that isn't Russian, and there's
already an English name for it, so when TRANSLATING a Russian statement I talk about the Fobos-Grunt mission to the moon Phobos.
When rendering names from another language or alphabet it's always a tricky choice - is the notorious late terrorist called Osama bin Laden, Usama bin Laden, or (translating) Leonine Ladenson? Transliterating is usually a better choice than translating in my opinion.
Meanwhile... crossing my fingers that the team can save the mission, whatever its name is..
