A Russian spacecraft crashed into the moon over the weekend, days before scientists had planned to land the craft there to test landing technology and search for water.
The Luna-25 lander was supposed to be the first Russian craft to reach the moon since the 1970s, but Russian scientists lost contact during the mission, and it crashed, according to Roscosmos, Russia’s state space corporation.
“The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon,” Roscosmos said.
A commission has been formed to investigate what led to the crash of the Luna-25, which is just the latest Russian space mission to go awry. The last Russian moon exploration took place in 1976 when Luna-24 was launched.
Russia’s space corporation had hoped that Luna-25 would prove the country was “capable of delivering a payload to the moon” and “ensure Russia’s guaranteed access to the moon’s surface.”
Luna-25 was supposed to land on the moon’s south pole, where no other spacecraft has ever made a landing. Some say the area may be home to precious elements and frozen water.
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“The first goal is to find the water, to confirm that it is there … to study its abundance,” said Olga Zakutnyaya, who works at Moscow’s Space Research Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, earlier this month.
Russia has faced technological and financial challenges in recent years, problems that have only been exacerbated by the cost of its war with Ukraine and the massive economic sanctions placed on it by Western countries over the invasion.
“It is so sad that it was not possible to land the apparatus,” said Mikhail Marov, a 90-year-old physicist and astronomer who worked in the Soviet space program decades ago. “This was perhaps the last hope for me to see a revival of our lunar program.”
Russia may work with China on future space missions, with plans for Lunar-26, Lunar-27, and Lunar-28.
An Indian spacecraft, the Chandrayaan-3, will attempt to land on the moon on August 23, a mission the Russians were competing against. India would be the fourth country to have a craft land on the moon, following the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China. A previous spacecraft from India crashed into the moon in 2019.