Russia’s first moon mission in decades fails as Luna-25 crashes into lunar surface
Luna-25 was supposed to execute a soft landing on the south pole of the moon on August 21, according to Russian space officials.
Since 1976, there has been just one country, China, which has been successful in getting its spacecraft to soft land on the moon. It has done that twice, with Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4. All other attempts in the last ten years, by India, Israel, Japan and now Russia, have remained unsuccessful. India is making a second attempt to land later this week, with Chandrayaan-3 getting into the pre-landing orbit early on Sunday morning.
Luna 25 had reported problems on Saturday, when it attempted to get into the pre-landing orbit for a scheduled landing on Monday. Russian space agency Roscosmos had said that during the operation, “an emergency situation” had risen which stopped the manoeuvre from taking place. Later, it also lost contact with the spacecraft.
On Sunday afternoon, Roscosmos confirmed that the spacecraft had crashed on the moon’s surface.
“The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for Luna 25 and get in touch with it did not produce any results. According to the results of the preliminary analysis, due to the deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from the calculated ones, the automatic station switched off to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” it said.
Luna 25 was named to signify the continuation of the Luna series of moon missions that were sent by the then Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. Luna 24, launched in 1976, was the last spacecraft to land on the moon’s surface, before lunar missions were completely stopped for nearly two decades.
Moon missions began again in the 1990s, and more frequently after 2003, with more countries joining the effort. China sent its first moon mission in 2007 and India in 2008. Both were Orbiters, and successful.
But making a soft-landing on the moon has remained extremely tricky. If Chandrayaan-3 is able to land successfully, India would become just the fourth country in the world, after the United States, the erstwhile Soviet Union and China, to have landed a spacecraft on the moon.
Later this month, a Japanese moon mission is also expected to be launched.
Luna 25 was just the first of a series of lunar missions that Russia plans to undertake in this decade. A Luna 26 is scheduled for launch within the next three years, while plans for at least two more in the series have already been announced.
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