A rash of small, fresh craters across the lunar surface testifies to the international rush to return to the Moon by means of robot spacecraft. In April 2019, the gyroscopes on Beresheet, built by a public-private Israeli partnership, failed during the craft’s descent towards a patch of Mare Serenitatis, causing it to crash. In September that year, Chandrayaan-2, a mission by the Indian space agency ISRO departed from trajectory towards its landing site, not far from the Moon’s South Pole. The result was what ISRO’s chief called “a hard landing” – one sufficiently hard for the probe to have never been heard from again. This April, a mission by ispace, a Japanese company, ended shortly after the Hakuto-R spacecraft decided that it had reached the surface of Mare Frigoris while still 5km above it, and turned off its engines. The Moon’s gravity is weaker than the Earth’s, but not by so much that a spacecraft can weather a fall from that distance.

On the morning of Aug 20, Russia announced that it had joined the ranks of the new crater-makers. Its Luna 25 mission, launched on Aug 11, entered orbit around the Moon on Aug 16. It was due to undertake its landing five days later. But on Aug 19, just after its controllers had told it to adjust its orbit in preparation, contact with the probe was lost. On the morning of Aug 20, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced that “a deviation between the actual and calculated parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre led the Luna 25 spacecraft to enter an undesignated orbit, and it ceased to exist following a collision with the surface of the Moon”.