Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission controllers have one last chance to establish communication with the doomed spacecraft starting Tuesday at 17:00 UTC through Wednesday at 23:00, when conditions will make the odds even grimmer.

According to Spaceflight101, over that period Phobos-Grunt will have constant sun exposure during all portions of its orbit around Earth and need not switch back and forth between safe mode in darkness and operational or contingency mode in daylight.

Mission controllers will use these optimal conditions to make contact attempts via two ground stations in Russia and Kazakhstan, the report said. The European Space Agency is also expected to continue attempts to send commands to the spacecraft via Maspalomas in the Canary Islands and/or Perth, Australia.

However, this will be possible only if the vehicle is still in a working condition and so far space officials do not whether the spacecraft is still alive. Some indications of Phobos-Grunt's tumbling were observed in December, but there are no new sighting updates from more recent observations.

ESA's Maspalomas station has made new attempts to make contact with Phobos-Grunt after standing down over the weekend and on Monday but its orbit remained unchanged and there was no engine burn.

The current orbit of the stranded spacecraft is 283 by 201 kilometers with a period of 89 minutes.

Efforts to communicate with the spacecraft will continue daily until re-entry even as some space officials and the spacecraft designer, the NPO Lavochkin, have declared the mission a failure, according to some sources.

Meanwhile, Russian space officials have already formed the teams concerned with re-entry and any tasks associated with entry response. The latest estimate is that the spacecraft will re-enter on January 10, 2012 +/-5 Days, Spaceflight101.com said.

In case of re-entry, the danger is not from fragments of the probe, which are expected to burn up, but the large supply of fuel, which can cause trouble if it falls over a populated area, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports.