Russian spacecraft Luna-25 has crashed on the Moon after it spun into uncontrolled orbit, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced on Sunday. This comes a day after the agency said Luna-25 has failed to enter pre-landing orbit of Moon.
“On August 19, in accordance with the Luna-25 flight programme, an impulse was provided to form its pre-landing elliptical orbit. At about 14:57 Moscow time, communication with the Luna-25 apparatus was interrupted. The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get in contact with it did not produce any results,” Roscosmos State Space Corporation said on its official Telegram channel.
Roscosmos said a probe would be launched into the causes of the crash but did not give any indication of what technical glitches might have led to the mishap.
Russia’s spacecraft, which was launched on August 11, performed two trajectory correction on August 12 and 14 and was scheduled to land on the south pole of the moon between Monday and Wednesday. The 800kg small car-sized Luna-25 was tasked to operate for a year on the lunar south pole. Russia previous Moon mission was Luna-24 in 1976 during the regime of Leonid Brezhnev amid the Cold War.
Chandrayaan-3 is also expected to make the landing on Wednesday. The Soviet Union, the US and China were countries that managed to make successful Moon landings. However, no country has ever landed on the south pole before and India will be the first one to do so once Chandrayaan-3 makes a successful landing.