moon-25the first probe launched by Russia towards the Moon since 1976, crashed into the earth satellite. Roscosmos, the Russian state space company, reported that it had lost contact with the spacecraft at 11:57 GMT on Saturday, after a problem getting it into orbit before landing. The landing was scheduled for Monday.
The accident occurred after Roscosmos reported an “abnormal situation” that his specialists were analyzing. On Saturday “around 2:57 p.m. [11H57 GMT]communication with moon-25 was interrupted,” the Russian space agency explained in a statement on Sunday. “According to the preliminary results” of the investigation, the device “ceased to exist after a collision on the lunar surface.he added.
Russia’s Space Race
According to the results of the preliminary analysis, the reason for the accident was “deviation from the actual impulse parameters” calculated in advance.
The failure 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 into Earth orbit -Sputnik 1, in 1957- and the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel in space in 1961.
It also occurs when the russian economyThe $2 trillion US is facing its biggest external challenge in decades: pressure from Western sanctions and fighting the biggest land war in Europe since World War II.
The agency of kremlin announced that it will create a special commission to clarify the causes of the accident but did not spread the news massively. In fact, Russian state television placed the news of the loss of the Luna-25 at number 8 of its noon schedule and only gave it 26 seconds of coverage, after a news story about fires in Tenerife and another 4-minute story about a vacation professionals for Russian pilots and crews.
Although missions to the Moon are fiendishly difficult, and many American and Soviet attempts have failed, Russia I had not tried one moon mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when communist leader Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Kremlin.
Competition with India
russia races India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on the moon this weekand more broadly with China and the United States, both with advanced lunar ambitions.
Upon news of the Luna-25 failure, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Chandrayaan-3 was set to land on the moon on August 23.
The Russian authorities hoped that the mission moon-25 will show that Russia can compete with the superpowers in space despite its post-Soviet decline and the enormous cost of the Ukrainian war.
Source: Ambito
