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Science and technology | One down, one to go

Russia’s bid to return to the Moon comes to an ignominious end

All eyes now turn to India

image: afp

Aug 20th 2023

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Arash of small, fresh craters across the lunar surface testifies to the international rush to return to the
Moon by means of robot spacecraft. In April 2019 the gyroscopes on Beresheet, built by a public-private
Israeli partnership, failed during the craft’s descent towards a patch of Mare Serenitatis, causing it to
crash. In September that year Chandrayaan-2, a mission by the Indian space agency, isro, departed from
trajectory towards its landing site, not far from the Moon’s south pole. The result was what isro’s chief
called “a hard landing”—one sufficiently hard for the probe to have never been heard from again. This
April a mission by ispace, a Japanese company, ended shortly after the hakuto-r spacecraft decided that
it had reached the surface of Mare Frigoris while still 5km above it, and turned off its engines. The
Moon’s gravity is weaker than the Earth’s, but not by so much that a spacecraft can weather a fall from
that distance.

On the morning of August 20th Russia announced that it had joined the ranks of the new crater-makers.
Its Luna 25 mission, launched on August 11th, entered orbit around the Moon on August 16th. It was
due to undertake its landing five days later. But on August 19th, just after its controllers had told it to
adjust its orbit in preparation, contact with the probe was lost. On the morning of August 20th
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced that “a deviation between the actual and calculated
parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre led the Luna 25 spacecraft to enter an undesignated orbit and
it ceased to exist following a collision with the surface of the Moon”.

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