The Russian space probe Luna-25, which was being postulated to be the first spacecraft to land on the moon's South Pole, crashed yesterday after a technical failure caused it to assume "an unplanned orbit" and collide with the lunar surface. as reported by the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, on its Telegram channel.
Everything was going smoothly and as planned since the unmanned probe took off on August 11. On Wednesday, it reached lunar orbit without incident. Even on Saturday, the spacecraft sent photos of the lunar surface and reported the impact of a micrometeorite against it.
Everything was ready for Luna-25 today to become the first spacecraft to land on the South Pole of the Moon, thus anticipating the Indian Chandrayaan-3 mission, which had launched more than a month earlier, on July 14. , and that it plans to land on the moon on August 23 or 24.
The jackpot, in addition to being the first to land on a part of the satellite where it has never been done before because it is difficult terrain, was the possibility of finding water in the form of ice.
But on the same Saturday the problems began for Luna-25. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, was reporting an "emergency situation" when the engines propelled Luna-25 into pre-moon landing orbit. Russian engineers on Earth lost communication with the probe at 2:57 p.m. on Saturday, Spanish time, and were never able to recover it.
According to the results of the preliminary analysis, the reason for the accident was that, due to "the deviation of the real impulse parameters with respect to the calculated ones, the ship ended up changing to an orbit outside the established and was destroyed as a result of a collision with the lunar surface”, explained Roscosmos.
Luna-25 only had time to send several images of the lunar surface – the Zeeman crater, 184 kilometers in diameter –, carry out some measurements and scientific experiments, and record the impact of a micrometeorite against the Moon.
The Russian space agency Roscosmos finally announced the creation of an "interdepartmental commission to study the specific reasons for the loss of contact with the spacecraft."
The Moon is once again in the crosshairs of all space agencies, since returning to the satellite is considered the essential step before one day being able to send manned missions to Mars. On the satellite, it is expected that one day bases will be established as an intermediate point on the journey to the red planet, bases that will need water and hence the interest in landing on the lunar poles.
But although humans first set foot on the Moon more than half a century ago, this is a challenge that is far from easy or overcome. As a button shows: the last three attempted missions have failed.
Before Luna-25 it was, in 2019, an Israeli private mission that lost its probe to the moon landing. Then it was the turn of the Japanese private mission Hakuto-R, which crashed on April 25. As the ship neared the surface, it misjudged its distance, accelerated, and ended up slamming into the lunar soil. This mission carried the Rashid rover, which was the first attempt by the United Arab Emirates to join the space race. And we must not forget that the rocket that Space X designs for trips to make manned trips to the Moon exploded during its test flight this same month of April.
Now we will have to be attentive to what happens this week with the Indian mission Chandrayaan-3, whose lunar lander also carries a rover.
The last two missions that have managed to reach the Moon have been Chinese. On January 3, 2019, the Chang'e 4 mission achieved a milestone: the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon. And on November 28, 2020, a Long March 5 rocket powered the Chang'e 5 mission, which managed to land on the moon on December 1, near Mons Rümker, an isolated volcano in the northwest of the visible side of the Moon, and which returned to Earth nearly two kilos of lunar soil samples.
