MOSCOW – Russia’s first Moon mission in 47 years failed after its Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and smashed into the Moon.
Russia’s state space corporation, Roscosmos, said it lost contact with Luna-25 shortly after a problem occurred as the lander was shunted into pre-landing orbit on Saturday.
“The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon,” Roscosmos said in a statement.
Roscosmos had said an “abnormal situation” occurred, as mission control tried to move the craft into a pre-landing orbit at 11.10pm GMT on Saturday (7.10am on Sunday Singapore time), ahead of a planned touchdown slated for Monday.
“During the operation, an abnormal situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the manoeuvre to be performed with the specified parameters,” it said in a short statement.
Unverified Russian-language Telegram channels had reported that communication with the craft had been lost, and Russia’s Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper cited an unidentified specialist as saying that the craft may have been lost.
Failure for the prestige mission would underscore the decline of Russia’s space power since its glory days during the Cold War, when Moscow was the first to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth – Sputnik 1, in 1957 – and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space in 1961.
Russia has not attempted a Moon mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Kremlin.
Luna-25 was supposed to execute a soft landing on the south pole of the Moon on Monday, according to Russian space officials.
Russia has been racing against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is also scheduled to land on the Moon’s south pole this week, and more broadly against China and the United States, which both have advanced lunar ambitions.
It was not immediately clear from official sources how serious the “abnormal situation” was – and whether or not Moscow can save the situation.
Under the headline “Space industry source: Luna-25 is lost”, the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper said Mr Alexander Ivanov, Roscosmos first deputy director, who directs orbital group projects, held an emergency meeting on the situation on Saturday evening.
Failure would underscore the pressure on Russia’s US$2 trillion (S$2.72 trillion) economy – and particularly its high-technology sectors – as it grapples with Western sanctions aimed at punishing Russia for the war in Ukraine. REUTERS
