2023-08-19 21:57:51
The country’s space agency, Roscosmos, said the spacecraft encountered unspecified problems while trying to enter a pre-landing orbit around the moon, and its specialists were analyzing the situation.
“During the operation, an abnormal situation arose on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” Roscosmos said in a Telegram message.
Roscosmos did not say whether the incident would prevent Luna-25 from landing.
The spacecraft is expected to touch down at the moon’s south pole on Monday, rushing to land on the Earth satellite ahead of an Indian spacecraft.
The lunar south pole is of particular interest to scientists, who believe its permanently shadowed polar craters may contain water. The water frozen in the rocks could be turned by future explorers into air and rocket fuel.
Also on Saturday, the Russian spacecraft produced its first results. Roscosmos said that the preliminary data obtained, and which is still being analyzed, contained information on the chemical elements of the lunar soil and that its equipment recorded a “micrometeorite impact”.
Roscosmos has released images of the Zeeman crater – the third largest in the moon’s southern hemisphere – taken from the spacecraft. The crater has a diameter of 190 kilometers and a depth of eight kilometers.
The August 10 launch of the Luna-25 spacecraft, from Russia’s Vostochny spaceport in the Far East, was Russia’s first since 1976, when it was part of the Soviet Union.
The Russian lunar lander was expected to reach the moon between August 21 and 23, around the same time as an Indian craft that was launched on July 14.
Only three governments have had successful moon landings: the Soviet Union, the United States, and China. India and Russia are aspiring to be the first countries to land on the moon’s south pole.
Roscosmos said it wants to show that Russia “is a state capable of delivering a payload to the Moon” and “ensure Russia’s guaranteed access to the surface of the Moon”.
The sanctions imposed on Russia after the invasion of Ukraine make it more difficult for the country to access Western technology, which has an impact on its space program.
The Luna-25 was originally intended to carry a small lunar vehicle, but that idea was scrapped to reduce the weight of the craft for better reliability, analysts say.
The spaceport is a pet project of Russian President Vladimir Putin and is key to his efforts to make Russia a space superpower and move Russian launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to Kazakhstan.
A previous Indian attempt to land at the moon’s south pole in 2019 ended when the lander crashed into the moon’s surface.
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