Russia’s first lunar probe in 47 years, Luna-25, crashed on Sunday, one week after takeoff, the country’s space agency Roscosmos announced on Sunday.
The Moon lander “passed into an uncontrolled orbit, collided with the Moon and ceased to exist,” Rsocosmos said in a statement. The unmanned spacecraft was supposed to make a soft landing at the Moon’s south pole, but failed after problems arose during pre-landing orbit.
An incident occurred on Saturday during a pre-landing maneuver of Russia’s Luna-25 probe, Roscosmos said it was “currently analyzing the situation,” reports AFP.
“At 14:10, a signal was issued to transfer the probe to pre-landing orbit. During the operation, an emergency situation arose on board the automatic (lunar) station, which did not allow the maneuver to be carried out with the specified parameters,” the Russian agency explained in a statement.
As Remix News reported a week ago, with the launch of Luna-25, Russia entered a direct race with India to reach the Moon’s south pole, a potential source of water to sustain a future human presence there.
Last June, Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov admitted to President Vladimir Putin that the Luna-25 mission was “risky.”
“The probability of success for such missions is estimated at about 70 percent,” he said of the probe, which weighs nearly 800 kilograms.
Putin has pledged to continue Russia’s space program despite difficulties in the sector, citing the example of the USSR sending the first man into space in 1961, at the height of the Cold War.
The previous mission “Luna-24” was sent in 1976 and delivered 170 grams of lunar soil to Earth.
