20 August 2023 , 09:11
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A Russian spacecraft Russia has crashed into the Moon after it spun out of control and ran into "unspecified trouble", Russia's space agency has said.
The Luna 25 was due to be Russia's first lunar landing mission in 47 years, with a planned soft landing on its south pole. But the unmanned aircraft failed to land after communication was interrupted, as it moved into its pre-landing orbit.
"During the operation, an abnormal situation occurred onboard the automatic station, which did not allow the manoeuvre to be performed with the specified parameters," Roscosmos said in a Telegram post while not specifying whether the incident will prevent Luna-25 from making a landing.
The rocket takes off in the Russian Far East on Friday, August 11, 2023 (AP)The robot, which is the size of a small car, blasted off on a Soyuz rocket in the Russian Far East and entered the moon's orbit on Wednesday. It was scheduled to land on the south pole of the moon on Monday, racing to land on Earth’s satellite before an Indian spacecraft. India's Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on the Moon next week. No country has ever landed on the south pole before, although both the US and China have landed softly on the Moon's surface.
Failure of the mission, personally ordered by Putin, underscores the decline of Russia's space power since the glory days of the Cold War. Roscosmos has been trying to prove itself as a "space superpower" since the invasion of Ukraine saw its experts lose access to Western technology.
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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. Russian sources are already blaming endemic corruption inside the agency for the failure of the mission and Putin is expected to axe top space officials over the disaster. A specially formed interdepartmental commission will investigate the reasons for the loss of Luna-25, Russian state media said.
The lunar south pole is of particular interest to scientists, who believe the permanently shadowed polar craters may contain water. The frozen water in the rocks could be transformed by future explorers into air and rocket fuel. Russia hoped the spacecraft would land on Monday and spend a year collecting samples of rock and dust.
The space agency's full statement said: "Communication with the Luna-25 spacecraft 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. According to the results of a preliminary analysis, due to the deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from the calculated ones, the device switched to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist."