Russia's first moon mission in nearly 50 years failed after its Luna-25 spun out of control and crashed into the moon, a day after developing technical difficulties, Russia's space agency Roscosmos said on Sunday. This was Russia's first lunar mission since the Soviet Union's Luna-24 mission brought back lunar samples in 1976.
The agency mentioned that an "abnormal situation" had occurred during a previous maneuver. A Soyuz 2.1 rocket carrying the Luna-25 spacecraft launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles east of Moscow at 2:11 am Moscow time on August 11. A little more than an hour later, the lander was propelled toward the moon from Earth's orbit.
So Close, Yet So Far
Luna-25 started orbiting the moon on August 16 and was scheduled to make a gentle landing attempt on Monday. However, Roskosmos reported that it lost communication with the spacecraft shortly after a problem occurred while the craft was being maneuvered into a pre-landing orbit on Saturday.
"The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon," Roskosmos said in a statement.
Earlier, Moscow had informed about an "abnormal situation" involving the craft.
"During the operation, an abnormal situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters," the agency said in a statement.
The failure of this Luna-25 mission underscores the declining influence of Russia in the realm of space exploration, a decline that contrasts with its heyday during the Cold War era. Back then, Moscow achieved remarkable feats, such as launching the world's first satellite, Sputnik 1, into Earth's orbit in 1957, and sending cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the pioneering journey into space in 1961.
Russia refrained from attempting lunar missions after the Luna-24 mission in 1976, during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin.
Who Is to Blame?
Sources from Russia are already attributing the mission's failure to systemic corruption within the agency. It's anticipated that President Putin will take action against senior space officials in response to this disaster.
The mission was originally intended to explore the south pole of the moon, marking a pioneering mission.
During the craft's launch, a remote village had to be evacuated due to concerns that debris might fall on it.
The failure adds to a series of setbacks in President Vladimir Putin's efforts concerning the conflict with Ukraine.
The space agency said, "Communication with the Luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted. 'The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get into contact with it did not produce any results.
"According to the results of a preliminary analysis, due to the deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from the calculated ones, the device switched to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface."
Luna-25 was intended to perform a soft landing on the moon's south pole on August 21, as per Russian space authorities.
Russia had been in a competition with India, where the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is set to land on the moon's south pole around the same time.
On a broader scale, Russia has been striving to keep pace with China and the United States, both of which have ambitious lunar aspirations.
