Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years fails after Luna-25 smashes into moon

Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years failed after its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and smashed into moon.

Russia’s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft shortly after a problem occurred as it was shunted into pre-landing orbit on Saturday.

A Soyuz 2.1 rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft blasted off from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles (5,550km) east of Moscow, on August 11th.

“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.

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It said a special interdepartmental commission had been formed to investigate the reasons behind the loss of the Luna-25 craft.

Luna-25, roughly the size of a small car, was due to operate for a year on the moon’s south pole, where scientists at Nasa and other space agencies in recent years have detected traces of water ice in the region’s shadowed craters.

No country has made a soft landing on the south pole of the moon to date as rough terrain makes a landing there difficult.

Failure for the prestige mission underscores the decline of Russia’s space power since the days of Cold War competition when Moscow was the first to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth – Sputnik 1, in 1957 – and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space in 1961.

Russia has not attempted a moon mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Kremlin. Luna-25 was supposed to execute a soft landing on the south pole of the moon on August 21st, according to Russian space officials.

Russia has been racing against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on the moon’s south pole this week, and more broadly against China and the United States which both have advanced lunar ambitions.

Officials had hoped that the Luna-25 mission would show Russia can compete with the superpowers in space despite its post-Soviet decline and the vast cost of the Ukraine war.

“The flight control system was a vulnerable area, which had to go through many fixes,” said Anatoly Zak, the creator and publisher of www.RussianSpaceWeb.com which tracks Russian space programmes.

Zak said Russia had also gone for the much more ambitious moon landing before undertaking a simpler orbital mission – the usual practice for the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India.

More than a decade ago, the failure of the 2011 Fobos-Grunt mission to one of the moons of Mars underscored the challenges facing Russia’s space programme: it could not even exit the earth’s orbit and fell back to earth, smashing into the Pacific Ocean in 2012.

Eventually, in the early 2010s, Russia settled upon the idea of the Luna-25 mission to the south pole of the moon. Luna-25 did manage to exit the earth’s orbit, but its failure means that Russia may not be the first to sample the frozen water which scientists believe the south pole of the moon holds.

It was not immediately unclear what long-term impact the failed mission would have on the country’s moon programme, which envisages several more missions over coming years.– Reuters