Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Aug 20: The Luna-25 probe, Russia’s first Moon mission in almost 50 years, which was virtually competing with India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission for landing on moon’s South Polar Region, has crashed on the Moon after an incident during pre-landing manoeuvres, Russian space agency Roscosmos said on Sunday.
Communication with Luna-25 was lost at 2:57 pm (1157 GMT) on Saturday, Roscosmos said. According to preliminary findings, the lander “has ceased to exist following a collision with the Moon’s surface,” Roscosmos said.
The crash of Luna-25 has left Indian mission on course to become the first spacecraft to land near the lunar South Pole.
On Sunday morning, Chandrayaan-3 moved into its pre-landing orbit of 25 km x 134 km from the lunar surface, in preparation for its scheduled landing on Wednesday. It is from this orbit that the spacecraft would begin its descent at around 5.45 pm IST on Wednesday and the touchdown is expected after about 15 minutes.
Roscosmos said an “abnormal situation” had occurred on Sunday as it was preparing to transfer to its pre-landing orbit. “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,” Roscosmos had said in a short statement. It said a special commission was looking into why the moonshot failed.
Luna-25 was scheduled to make a soft landing on the Moon’s surface on Monday, August 21, two days ahead of Chandrayaan-3. Both of them were supposed to land in the region around the lunar South Pole. But the Russian spacecraft developed problems as it tried to move into the pre-landing orbit on Saturday. “Measures taken on August 19 and 20 to locate the craft and make contact with it were unsuccessful.”
The space agency said an investigation would be launched into the causes of the crash, without giving any indication of what technical problems might have occurred. It, however, said a preliminary analysis of Luna 25 mission issue suggested that a deviation between the actual and calculated parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre led to the spacecraft transitioning into an unintended orbit, resulting in its collision with the lunar surface and subsequent loss.
With Luna-25, Moscow had hoped to build on the legacy of its Soviet-era Luna programme, marking a return to independent lunar exploration in the face of growing isolation from the West. The 800-kilogram Luna-25 probe was to have made a soft landing on the lunar South Pole, the first in history.
Russia has not attempted to land on a celestial body since 1989, when the Soviet Union’s ill-fated Phobos 2 probe to explore the moons of Mars failed due to an on-board computer malfunction. Roscosmos boss Yuri Borisov had said the venture would be “risky”, telling President Vladimir Putin face to face in June that the probability of it succeeding was “around 70 percent.”
A Soyuz 2.1 rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft had blasted off from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 5,550 km east of Moscow, at 2:11 a.m. Moscow time on August 11. The lander was boosted out of Earth’s orbit toward the moon a little over an hour later. It entered the moon’s orbit on August 16 and was due to attempt a soft landing on Monday.
Failure for the prestige mission underscores the decline of Russia’s space power since the glory days of Cold War competition 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.
Russia has been racing against Chandrayaan-3 and more broadly against China and the United States which both have advanced lunar ambitions. The failure also underscores the pressure on Russia’s $2 trillion economy, which has so far withstood what the West casts as the most stringent sanctions ever imposed.
The West says the sanctions have weakened Russia’s economy, particularly the high-technology parts of it which often rely on imports. President Vladimir Putin says Russia’s economy is showing remarkable strength.
Over the past three decades, Russia has considered various moon missions which were delayed or shelved amid the chaos of the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing economic and political turmoil.
The failure of the 2011 Fobos-Grunt mission to one of the moons of Mars underscored the challenges facing Russia’s space programme: it could not even exit the earth’s orbit and fell back to earth, smashing into the Pacific Ocean in 2012. Eventually, in the early 2010s, Russia settled upon the idea of the Luna-25 mission to the south pole of the moon.