Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Phobos program was a Soviet uncrewed space mission consisting of two probes, Phobos 1 and Phobos 2, launched in July 1988 to study Mars and its moon Phobos. The missions aimed to study the interplanetary environment, observe the Sun, characterize Mars's plasma environment, analyze the Martian surface and atmosphere, and determine the surface composition of Phobos.
Phobos 1 failed on the 2nd of September 1988 when a single-character error in an uploaded command sequence accidentally executed a ground-test routine that deactivated the spacecraft's attitude thrusters. Without attitude control, the probe lost its Sun lock, its solar arrays stopped charging, and its batteries died. The test routine had been left in the PROM-coded software because removing it would have required replacing the entire computer, and time pressure before launch made that impossible.
Phobos 2 entered Mars orbit on the 29th of January 1989 and returned 37 images of Phobos at a resolution of up to 40 meters. Its infrared spectrometer gathered 45,000 near-infrared spectra of Mars's equatorial regions and 400 spectra of Phobos, enabling the first mineralogical maps of both Mars and its moon. Contact was lost before the planned landers could be deployed onto the surface of Phobos.
Fifteen countries participated in the Phobos program in total, with the Soviet Union leading and 14 other nations contributing. These included Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, France, West Germany, and the United States, which provided access to its NASA Deep Space Network for tracking the two spacecraft.
The Phobos probes carried a wide range of instruments including solar x-ray and ultraviolet telescopes, a neutron spectrometer, the ISM infrared spectrometer developed at Paris Observatory, the Lima-D laser experiment for surface chemistry analysis, the ASPERA electron spectrometer and ion mass analyzer from the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, and the Grunt imaging radar carried only by Phobos 1. The planned landers included seismometers, x-ray/alpha spectrometers, and the Razrez penetrator.
Phobos 1 and 2 used the new 1F spacecraft design, which succeeded the 4MV type used in Venera planetary missions from 1975-1985 and the 5VK design used for Vega 1 and Vega 2 at Comet Halley. Each probe had a mass of 2,600 kg, rising to 6,220 kg with orbital insertion hardware, and was launched on a Proton-K rocket.