Moscow fails. Russia failed to make history, becoming the first country to successfully land on the moon’s south pole, a region with significant water reserves whose control is contested by major space powers. The robotic Luna-25 probe, the first to carry this country to Earth’s moon in more than 40 years, experienced problems after a pre-landing approach maneuver into orbit on Saturday, according to Roscosmos, which eventually led to the failure of the mission.
“The device entered an unforeseen orbit and ceased to exist due to a collision with the lunar surface,” the Russian Space Agency reported. Moscow lost communications with the ship after the maneuver and, despite trying for hours to restore it, finally confirmed the worst result.
On Saturday, during an impulse to move the module in the direction of orbit before landing, “an emergency situation arose on board the robotic probe” – as Roskosmos explained on the same day – “which did not allow the maneuver to be carried out with the robotic probe”. specified parameters”. .
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“About 2:57 p.m. Moscow time [13.57 hora peninsular española]Communication with Luna-25 has been lost. “Steps taken on August 19 and 20 to locate and contact the device were unsuccessful,” Roscosmos said today. According to the results of the preliminary analysis, the spacecraft’s buoyancy was greater than calculated, so the spacecraft went into too steep an orbit and crashed to the lunar surface.
An image captured by the Luna-25 spacecraft’s camera during its flight. ROSCOSMOS (via Portal)
Our satellite has no atmosphere, so ships cannot slow down with parachutes and must pin all hopes on the use of retro-missiles and a good automatic landing system on rough terrain. Only the US, Soviet Russia and China have landed on the moon, and to date no one has landed on the South Pole.
The failure represents a setback for Russia’s space program as the country is at war with Ukraine and weakened by economic sanctions from Western countries. Moscow announces the formation of a commission to clarify the reasons for the loss of the ship.
Russia’s previous attempt to launch into space beyond Earth orbit set a bad precedent for Moscow. In November 2011, it sent the Phobos-Grunt probe toward the moon of Mars, but fell back to Earth in January after Roscosmos crashed shortly after Start into space had lost contact with the probe.
Apart from China’s probes that have successfully landed on the moon, landing on the moon remains too complicated a challenge: in 2019, the Israeli Beresheet probe and the Indian Vikram probe crashed. The same fate suffered the private Japanese module Hakuto-R in April this year. Japan will try again on Friday when it launches the SLIM probe towards the moon.
Only India remained
Days earlier, both Luna-25 and its Indian-launched competitor Chandrayaan-3 had successfully completed their maneuvers to set their lunar orbit from which they would descend and land at the South Pole. The Indians plan to land on Wednesday 23rd at 21:34 Peninsular Spanish time. Its major advantage is that, unlike the Russian probe, the Chandrayaan-3 carries a small mobile robot to explore the area near its landing site.
The device, which weighs more than a ton and is three meters high, sent one of its first images to earth on Friday. It came from Zeeman Crater, a depression near the south pole on the far side of the moon. “The resulting images add significantly to the information currently available about this crater,” the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI), which is responsible for the spacecraft’s scientific instruments, said in a press release. “The first image of the far side of the moon was taken by the Soviet automatic station Luna-3 in October 1959,” it said.
Russian Space Agency technicians finalize the details of the Luna 25 module.Roskosmos
The Russian spacecraft was scheduled to touch down north of Bogulawsky Crater, a huge impact basin 95 kilometers in diameter whose depths that sunlight never reaches can contain large amounts of frozen water. This compound is the new lunar gold that future space missions hope to use to extract fuel for rockets, as well as oxygen and water to support future human bases on the satellite. Though the United States is undoubtedly the most advanced country in this new space race, this week Russia and India battled it out to be the first to land on the moon’s hostile southern territory.
The landing of Luna-25 would have been fully automated. Mission officials had no chance of maneuvering from Earth and had to trust the probe’s programming to use the retrorockets to slow it down and land on the planned landing zone. In order for the ship not to capsize, the slope of the terrain could not be more than 15 degrees, and the speed had to be that of a slow-walking person. To ensure they did not fail, engineers had staked out a broad landing ellipse 30 kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide near Bogulawsky Crater.
Luna-25 wanted to make history by touching the moon’s waters for the first time. Ever since two spacecraft launched by India and the United States spotted the first signs of ice at the lunar poles in 2009, there has been a race to know how much water there is on the moon and to lay the foundations for its exploitation. Luna-25 was equipped with a robotic arm that would dig a few centimeters into the ground until it found ice, insert it into its gut and analyze it with various instruments to determine its composition. The ship also had other instruments that could remotely analyze the composition of the terrain and detect the presence of ice, as well as thorium, potassium and uranium.
Those in charge of the mission hoped that the probe would start its work and conduct experiments immediately after landing. Luna-25 was the first in a series of missions aimed at Russia’s quest for a role in the new space race. According to Roscosmos’ plans before the failure, Luna-26 would be an orbital probe, followed by Luna-27 equipped with an oil rig to penetrate five feet into the ground, and Luna-28 which will bring back samples from the region. polar from the moon to the earth. The last ship in history to do such a thing was precisely the Luna-24 probe, launched by the Soviet Union in 1976. However, by this time the United States had already won the space race with the Apollo astronauts.
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