Luna 25, Russia’s first
moon mission in nearly 50 years, has ended in a crash landing, the Russian
space agency said on Sunday, once again highlighting the risks involved in a
lunar landing.
Since
1976, there has been just one country, China, which has been successful in
getting its spacecraft to soft land on the moon. It has done that twice, with
Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4. All other attempts in the last ten years, by India,
Israel, Japan and now Russia, have remained unsuccessful. India is making a
second attempt to land later this week, with Chandrayaan-3 getting
into the pre-landing orbit early on Sunday morning.
Luna
25 had reported problems on Saturday, when it attempted to get into the
pre-landing orbit for a scheduled landing on Monday. Russian space agency
Roscosmos had said that during the operation, “an emergency situation” had
risen which stopped the manoeuvre from taking place. Later, it also lost
contact with the spacecraft.
On Sunday
afternoon, Roscosmos confirmed that the spacecraft had crashed on the moon’s
surface.
“The
measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for Luna 25 and get in touch with
it did not produce any results. According to the results of the preliminary
analysis, due to the deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from the
calculated ones, the automatic station switched off to an off-design orbit and
ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” it said.
Luna 25 was named to
signify the continuation of the Luna series of moon missions that were sent by
the then Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s. Luna 24, launched in 1976, was
the last spacecraft to land on the moon’s surface, before lunar missions were
completely stopped for nearly two decades.
Moon
missions began again in the 1990s, and more frequently after 2003, with more
countries joining the effort. China sent its first moon mission in 2007 and
India in 2008. Both were Orbiters, and successful.
But making a soft-landing on the moon has remained extremely tricky. If Chandrayaan-3 is able to land successfully, India would become just the fourth country in the world, after the United States, the erstwhile Soviet Union and China, to have landed a spacecraft on the moon.
Luna 25 was just the first of a series of lunar missions that Russia plans to undertake in this decade. A Luna 26 is scheduled for launch within the next three years, while plans for at least two more in the series have already been announced.
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Credit: THE INDIAN EXPRESS
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