Russia's Luna-25 crash-lands on Moon day before planned touch down on south pole

Russia's space agency Roscosmos on Sunday confirmed that its Luna-25 has crash-landed on Moon. It said that on Saturday, in accordance with the flight program of the spacecraft, the output of an impulse was provided for the formation of its pre-landing elliptical orbit. "At about 14:57 Moscow time, communication with the Luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted," the space agency said in a statement on Telegram.

The agency further said that the measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get in contact 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 device switched to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface."

"A specially formed interdepartmental commission will deal with the issues of clarifying the reasons for the loss of the Moon." 

Luna-25 crash-landed just a day before its planned touchdown on the south pole of the Moon. With this, Russia's lunar mission after nearly five decades came to a heartbreaking end. Luna-25 was launched on August 10 and entered into lunar orbit on August 16. It was to soft-land on Monday, two days before India's  Chandyraan. 

Hours before the Russian space agency's confirmation, Franck Marchis, a planetary astronomer at SETI Institute, said that it was not officially confirmed, but Luna25 (Luna-Glob) may have met its end on the moon. "Roskomos hasn't denied it, and there's been no contact with the spacecraft for the last 10 hours," he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. 

In a statement late Saturday, Roscosmos said that it attempted to transfer its spacecraft to the pre-landing orbit but during the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, "which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters".

Meanwhile, Indian space agency Isro, in its latest update, said Chandrayaan-3 is set to land on the Moon on August 23, around 18:04 PM.

Also Read: Chandrayaan-3 set to land on Moon on August 23 at around 6:04 pm, says ISRO

Also Watch: Meet the man behind Chandrayaan-3: ISRO Chairman S. Somanath; India’s Moon Mission updates

 

Also Read: Can Chandrayaan-3 become first to land on Moon's south pole as Russia's Luna-25 suffers glitch?