The Luna-25 probe, the first Russian lunar mission in almost 50 years, crashed on the Moon after an incident during pre-lunar landing maneuvers, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced on Sunday.
Communication with Luna-25 was lost at 2:57 p.m. (1157 GMT) on Saturday, Roscosmos said in a statement. According to preliminary results, the lander “ceased to exist after a collision with the surface of the Moon.”
On Saturday, Roscosmos had already announced that it would be difficult to complete this mission due to problems related to the pre-moon procedure, which would have been interrupted due to a situation considered “abnormal”.
If the Russian mission had been successful, the Luna-25 probe, launched on August 11, would be the first space device to land at the South Pole, the region where the United States wants to place the first female astronaut and the first black astronaut. , under the new lunar Artemis program.
Only the United States had astronauts on the surface of the Moon, between 1969 and 1972, all men, under the Apollo program.
Four astronauts are scheduled to be sent to orbit the Moon by November of next year: three Americans, including a woman and a black man, and for the first time, a Canadian.
The launch of the Luna-25 spacecraft to the Moon from Russia’s Vostochny spaceport is Russia’s first since 1976, when it was part of the Soviet Union.
Only three countries have successfully landed on the Moon: the Soviet Union, the United States, and China. India and Russia are aiming to be the first to land on the moon’s south pole.
The lunar south pole is of particular interest to scientists, who believe that polar craters may contain water. Future explorers could turn frozen water in rocks into air and rocket fuel.
Luna-25 was initially envisioned to carry a small lunar rover, but that idea was dropped to reduce the spacecraft’s weight and increase its reliability.
Source: TSF
