Russia would make another attempt to send a Phobos-Grunt probe to Mars' satellite in 2018, a leading space expert said Wednesday.

The probe would be named Phobos-Grunt-2 and the plan was initiated by the Russian Academy of Sciences, according to Lev Zeleny, director of the academy's Institute of Space Research.

He told a press conference that 2018 was chosen because it would be the shortest distance between the Earth and Mars that year and that Russia's domestic space industry would also see a dramatic improvement by then.

The second Phobos-Grunt would cost "a little more than 50 percent of previous costs," as the infrastructure was already in place from when they built the first probe, Zeleny said.

Specialists have estimated that the crashed Phobos-Grunt interplanetary station, which failed to reach orbit after a computer malfunction and crashed back to Earth last month, cost five billion rubles (164.7 million U.S. dollars).

The probe, carrying China's Yinghuo-1 satellite, was launched on Nov. 9 and crashed on Jan. 15.