Russia’s first lunar mission in decades has ended in failure with its Luna 25 spacecraft crashing into the moon’s surface.
The incident, a blow to Russia’s space ambitions, happened after communication with the robotic spacecraft was interrupted.
Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said it lost touch with Luna 25 on Saturday around 2:57 p.m. Moscow time.
“The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get into contact with it did not yield any results,” the space agency reported.
According to a “preliminary analysis,” Luna-25 “switched to an off-design orbit” before the collision, Roscosmos said.
The previous day, they stated, according to a Google Translate translation of the post, that at 14:10 Moscow Time (7:10 a.m. EDT, 1110 UTC) they commanded the lander to begin a pre-landing orbit lowering maneuver.
However, Roscosmos stated on Aug. 19, “During the operation, an emergency situation occurred onboard the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specific parameters. The management team is currently analyzing the situation.”
That was followed up on Aug. 20 with additional clarification that the signal disruption came at 14:57 Moscow Time (7:57 a.m. EDT, 1157 UTC) and that corrective measures on both Aug. 19 and 20 proved unsuccessful.
It was Russia's first moon mission since the Soviet Union's Luna-24 returned with samples from the moon in 1976.
A Soyuz 2.1 rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft blasted off from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles (5,550 km) east of Moscow, at 2:11 a.m. Moscow time on Aug. 11.
The lander was boosted out of Earth's orbit toward the moon a little over an hour later. It entered the moon's orbit on Aug. 16 and was due to attempt a soft landing on Monday.
The spacecraft was scheduled to land on the south pole of the moon on Monday, racing to land on Earth's satellite ahead of an Indian spacecraft.
The lunar south pole is of particular interest to scientists, who believe the permanently shadowed polar craters may contain water. The frozen water in the rocks could be transformed by future explorers into air and rocket fuel
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