HELSINKI — Russia’s Luna-25 mission resulted in failure after crashing into the moon, space agency Roscosmos has announced.
A statement posted to the agency’s Telegram social media channel early Aug. 20 confirmed that an anomaly during an Aug. 19 maneuver to lower Luna-25’s orbit resulted within the spacecraft impacting the lunar surface.
The spacecraft was scheduled to try a soft lunar landing Aug. 21, near Boguslawsky crater, positioned roughly 70 degrees south latitude within the vicinity of the south polar region of the moon.
Roscosmos announced Aug. 19 that at 7:10 a.m. Eastern that day Luna-25 was instructed to fireside its engines to send the spacecraft right into a “pre-landing” orbit across the moon. The planned maneuver was anomalous, nonetheless.
“An emergency situation occurred on board the automated station, which didn’t allow the maneuver to be performed with the required parameters,” in response to a translation of the Roscosmos statement.
The agency clarified Sunday that contact was lost with the spacecraft around 7:57 a.m. Eastern. Measures taken Aug. 19 and 20 to reestablish contact with Luna-25 weren’t successful, in response to the Aug. 20 statement.
A preliminary evaluation revealed that a deviation of the particular parameters of the impulse from those calculated resulted within the spacecraft colliding with the lunar surface, in response to a machine translation of the statement.
“A specially formed interdepartmental commission will take care of the problems of clarifying the explanations for the lack of the Moon,” the statement read.
The Luna-25 mission launched on a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East Aug. 10.
The mission had endured lengthy delays stemming from technical issues and resource constraints. It carried plenty of science payloads but was mainly a technology demonstrator for future lunar landings later in the last decade.
That technology, stripped of a European navigation camera following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, couldn’t be tested. The country’s previous lunar landing was Luna-24, a Soviet-era sample return mission, in 1976.
The lack of Luna-25 is a blow to Russia’s own plans in addition to wider cooperative efforts. The mission was also nominally a part of the China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). The Luna-25 launch was attended by Wu Yanhua, a senior official involved in China’s deep space exploration projects.
A ILRS roadmap unveiled in St. Petersburg, Russia, in June 2021 noted that Russian super heavy-lift launch vehicles would share the burden of launching major pieces of infrastructure for the station within the 2030s. Observers have expressed doubts on Russia’s capabilities to contribute significantly to the project following its occupation of Ukraine.
Luna-25 was being described within the media as being in a race with India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander to set down near the moon’s south polar region. Chandrayaan-3 successfully lowered its lunar orbit Aug. 19, setting it up for a landing attempt at an analogous latitude to Luna 25.
Chandrayaan-3’s landing is predicted around 8.34 a.m. Eastern Aug. 23. An additional mission, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) by Japan’s space agency JAXA, is scheduled for launch on a H-2A rocket Aug. 25. SLIM is a landing technology demonstrator aiming to make exploration more precise and economical.