- Roskosmos reported on Sunday that Russia‘s Luna-25 spacecraft had collided with the moon.
- Abnormal situation occurs during pre-landing orbit on the ship.
- Chandrayaan-3 will make an effort to perform a soft landing on August 23 at 6:04 PM.
Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, reported on Sunday that Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft had collided with the moon after spinning into an uncontrolled orbit. In 47 years, Luna-25 was Russia’s first moon mission.
The news comes a day after Roskosmos announced that there was a problem with launching Luna-25 into a pre-landing orbit. As a result of a collision with the Moon’s surface, the device “moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist,” according to a statement from Roskosmos.
Luna-25, a Russian spacecraft
As mission control attempted to place the ship into a pre-landing orbit at 11:10 GMT on Saturday, ahead of a scheduled touchdown scheduled for August 21, the agency had stated that an “abnormal situation” had occurred.
According to a brief statement from Roskosmos, “During the operation, an abnormal situation on board the automatic station occurred, which prevented the maneuver from being performed with the specified parameters.”
Failure to complete the prestige mission emphasizes Russia’s declining space power since the height of the Cold War rivalry, when Moscow launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit the Earth, in 1957, and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel into space in 1961.
Since Luna-24, which was launched in 1976 under Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership, Russia has not made an effort at a lunar mission. On August 21, Luna-25 was planned to carry out a gentle landing on the moon’s south pole.
Russia had been competing with China and the United States, which also have advanced lunar aspirations, as well as India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is expected to touch down on the moon’s south pole this week.
The spacecraft had already made great progress in beating India’s Chandryaan-3 to the south pole of the moon. According to Isro, Chandrayaan-3 will make an effort to perform a soft landing on August 23 at 6:04 PM.
