The exact details of the reason(s) behind the failure of the mission are yet to be ascertained but as Russian space agency Roscosmos said a few hours before the crash, “Luna-25 Suffered Emergency Situation Above The Moon.”

Luna-25 Crash: Russia’s ambitious and first lunar mission in 47 years after the disintegration of the erstwhile Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) failed on Sunday after the Luna-25 spacecraft crashed onto the Moon’s surface, as announced by the country’s space agency Roscosmos.

Luna-25 Suffered Emergency Situation

The exact details of the reason(s) behind the failure of the mission are yet to be ascertained but as Russian space agency Roscosmos said a few hours before the crash, “Luna-25 Suffered Emergency Situation Above The Moon.”

“Today, in accordance with the flight program, at 14:10 Moscow time, the automatic station Luna-25 gave an impulse to transfer to the pre-landing orbit. During the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” Roscosmos said in a statement adding that a special commission was looking into why the moonshot failed.

Luna-25 spacecraft was scheduled to make a soft landing on the Moon’s south pole on Monday to explore a part of the Moon which scientists think could hold frozen water and precious elements.

Roscosmos Lost Contact With Luna-25 On Saturday

Roscosmos said on Sunday morning that it had lost contact with the Luna-25 shortly after 14:57 pm 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,” it said in a statement, reported BBC.

It is worth noting that no country has ever landed on the Moon’s south pole before, although both the USA and China have landed softly on the Moon’s surface.

What Might Be More Probable Causes Behind Luna 25 Crash

The 800-kilogram Luna-25 probe was to have made a soft landing on the lunar south pole, the first in history. Roscosmos said it wanted to show Russia “is a state capable of delivering a payload to the moon,” and “ensure Russia’s guaranteed access to the moon’s surface.”

Luna-25 has planned a soft landing on Monday on the moon’s south pole which is relatively unexplored. The lunar south pole is of particular interest to scientists, who believe the permanently shadowed polar craters may contain frozen water in the rocks that future explorers could transform into air and rocket fuel.

However, it spun out of control moving into an unpredictable orbit, and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon.

According to Anatoly Zak, the creator and publisher of www.RussianSpaceWeb.com, the flight control system of Luna-25 was a vulnerable area, which had to go through many fixes.

Zak said Russia had also gone for the ambitious landing before undertaking a simpler orbital mission, which has been taken by the US, China, and India.

Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov had said the venture would be “risky” and informed President Vladimir Putin in June that the probability of it succeeding was “around 70 percent”, reported AFP.

Soviet Union’s (USSR’s) Luna-24

It was Russia’s first moon mission since the Soviet Union’s (USSR’s) Luna-24 returned with samples from the moon in 1976.

On 22 August 1976, the erstwhile Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), launched Luna 24 which was a robotic probe of the Soviet Union’s Luna programme. The mission of the Luna 24 probe was the third Soviet mission to return lunar soil samples from the Moon (the first two sample return missions were Luna 16 and Luna 20). It landed in Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises) and returned 170.1 g (6.00 oz) of lunar samples to the Earth.

It is worth mentioning that since Luna 24 in 1976, only China has been successful in getting its spacecraft to soft-land on the moon, that too twice with Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4. All other attempts in the last 10 years, by India, Israel, Japan, and now Russia, have remained unsuccessful.

Remarkable Space Related Achievements Of Former Soviet Union’s AKA Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR’s) From 1955 To 1991

• The Soviet/Russian space programme was the national space program of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), active from 1955 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
• It was during the Cold War between the United States and the USSR that the latter held the upper hand while competing in the Space Race with the USA and later with the European Union and China.
• The Soviet/Russian space programme set many records in space exploration, including the first intercontinental missile R-7 Semyorka that launched the first satellite Sputnik 1, sent the first animal Laika, the Soviet space dog, into Earth orbit in 1957, and placed the first human Yuri Gagarin, in space in 1961.
• R-7 made 28 launches between 1957 and 1961.
• The Soviets also sent the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, on 16 June 1963. She orbited the Earth 48 times and spent almost three days in space.
• On 18 March 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to leave a space capsule and, secured to it, float freely in orbit to space-walk.
• Computerized robotic missions exploring the Moon that started in 1959.
• The first to reach the surface of the Moon, recording the first image of the far side of the Moon, and achieving the first soft landing on the Moon.
• The Soviet program also achieved the first space rover deployment with the Lunokhod programme in 1966.
• Sent the first robotic probe that automatically extracted a sample of lunar soil and brought it to Earth in 1970, Luna 16.
• The Soviet program led the first interplanetary probes to Venus and Mars and made successful soft landings on these planets in the 1960s and 1970s.
• It put the first space station, Salyut 1, into low Earth orbit in 1971, and the first modular space station, Mir, in 1986.
• Its Interkosmos program was also notable for sending the first citizen of a country other than the United States or the Soviet Union into space.
• Unlike American, European, and Chinese who had their programmes run under a single coordinating agency, the Soviet space program was divided and split among several internally competing design bureaus led by Korolev, Kerimov, Keldysh, Yangel, Glushko, Chelomey, Makeyev, Chertok and Reshetnev.
• The Soviet space program served as an important marker of Soviet claims to its global superpower status.
• On April 3, 1984, Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma of the Indian Air Force (IAF), along with Soviet cosmonauts, Col. Yuri Vasilevish Malyzhev and Col. Gennady Mikhailovich Strekalov blasted off Soyuz T-11, becoming the first and only Indian and 138th man to visit space. The flight was part of a joint space program between the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Soviet Intercosmos Space Programme. They spent eight days in space aboard the Salyut 7 Space Station.
• Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma is now veteran Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma (Ashoka Chakra).

There are many more high points achieved by the erstwhile USSR and present-day Russia in the field of astronomy and space missions, but time and space are constraints.

(With agency inputs)

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