Why Russia's Luna-25 Probe Crashed On Moon And What It Means For Moscow

Russia's state space corporation, Roskosmos, said an "abnormal situation" occurred as mission control tried to move the craft into a pre-landing orbit.


  The lander was boosted out of Earth's orbit toward the moon a little over an hour later.


Moscow: After spinning out of control and colliding with the moon, Russia's Luna-25 spacecraft was unable to launch its first moon mission in nearly 50 years.

The mission's specifics and what a failure would most likely entail are described below.

LUNA-25

Since the Soviet Union's Luna-24 returned with lunar samples in 1976, this was Russia's first moon mission.

On August 11, at 2:11 a.m. Moscow time, a Soyuz 2.1 rocket carrying the Luna-25 spacecraft launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles (5,550 km) east of Moscow.

A little more than an hour later, the lander was propelled toward the moon from Earth's orbit. It began orbiting the moon on August 16 and was scheduled to make a gentle landing attempt on Monday.

'ABNORMAL SITUATION'

The spacecraft encountered a "abnormal situation" about 11:10 GMT on Saturday, according to Roskosmos, the state-owned space corporation of Russia.

It stopped communicating with the craft on Saturday at 11:57 GMT.

According to a statement from Roskosmos, the device "moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon."

It stated that a special commission was investigating the moonshot's failure.

WHAT DOES FAILURE MEAN FOR RUSSIA?

Failure on the high-profile project highlights Russia's declining space prowess since the height of the Cold War rivalry, when Moscow launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit the Earth, in 1957, and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel into space in 1961.

Since Luna-24 in 1976, when Leonid Brezhnev was in charge of the Kremlin, Russia had not made an effort at a moon mission.According to Russian space officials, Luna-25 was scheduled to perform a gentle landing on the south pole of the moon on August 21.

Failure also highlights the strain on Russia's $2 trillion economy, which has so far resisted what the West describes as the most severe sanctions ever put in place.

The West claims that the sanctions have hurt Russia's economy, especially its high-tech sectors, which frequently depend on imports.According to President Vladimir Putin, the Russian economy is displaying impressive vigor.

Russia has contemplated a number of lunar trips during the past three decades, but they were postponed or abandoned due to the disarray caused by the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the accompanying economic and political unrest.

The 2011 Fobos-Grunt mission to one of Mars' moons failed, underscoring the difficulties Russia's space program is facing: it was unable to even leave the Earth's orbit and crashed back to Earth in 2012, slamming into the Pacific Ocean.

Russia ultimately decided to pursue the Luna-25 mission to the south pole of the moon in the early 2010s.

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