Russia’s first lunar mission in decades, Luna 25, crashes into the Moon

It was one of the sad days yesterday for the space enthusiasts as well as scientists all around the world as we know that Russia’s spacecraft on the moon mission, Luna 25, crashed into the moon while landing and it is also revealed that issues started on August 19 and 20 and they could not be resolved which meant that the spacecraft crash-landed on the moon in which could be a big blow to the efforts of Roscosmos in space research. It is also worth noting that India’s Chandrayaan 3 is also on its moon mission right now and will try to land on August 23 at around 6pm IST.

We do hope that the space research community can salvage the news of Luna 25 with that of Chandrayaan 3 landing on the moon. It is worth noting that both the Luna 25, and the Chandrayaan 3, are trying to land on the southern side of moon which has not been explored as of now. Chandrayaan 3 is the successor to Chandrayaan 2 which had the similar fate as of Luna 25 when it also crash-landed on the moon as it could not be contacted during the soft landing.

Talking about Russia’s Luna 25, Roscosmos, said it lost touch with Luna 25 on Saturday around 2:57 p.m. Moscow time. The space agency also said that “The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get into contact with it did not yield any results”. Roscosmos even did a “preliminary analysis” and found that Luna 25 “switched to an off-design orbit” before the collision. On Saturday, Roscosmos shared a post of Telegram saying that “During the operation, an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,”

NASA’s former head of science took to X(Twitter) and posted that “We are reminded that landing on any celestial object is anything but easy & straightforward,” and added that “Just because others managed to do it decades ago, does not guarantee success today.” Obviously, we know that politics should not come in the way of space research but we do sense a bit of sarcasm in USA’s statement on Russia’s launch and mission failure.