Friday I wrote about the fact that two lunar landers were expected to touch down on the moon’s surface this week. India launched the Chandrayaan-3 lander about a month ago and expected to land it on Wednesday. Russia launched its own lander, the Luna 25, a couple weeks later but thanks to a different approach expected to land it a couple days before India’s lander.
Unfortunately, something went wrong with Russia’s lander yesterday and Roscosmos said it had lost contact before the lander impacted the moon.
The Luna-25 lander, Russia’s first space launch to the moon’s surface since the 1970s, entered lunar orbit last Wednesday and was supposed to land as early as Monday. At 2:10 p.m. on Saturday afternoon Moscow time, according to Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russias space activities, the spacecraft fired its engine to enter an orbit that would set it up for a lunar landing. But an unexplained “emergency situation” occurred.
On Sunday, Roscosmos said that it had lost contact with the spacecraft 47 minutes after the start of the engine firing. Attempts to re-establish communications failed, and Luna-25 had deviated from its planned orbit and “ceased its existence as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” Roscosmos said.
This is pretty much what happened to a previous Indian attempt to land on the moon in 2019. That’s when the Chandrayaan-2 lander stopped responding just 2 kilometers above the surface.
With Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi looking on at the control center, the Indian Space Research Organization’s Vikram lander fired its braking rockets shortly after 4 p.m. ET, kicking off what was to have been a 15-minute descent to the surface.
The Chandrayaan-2 lander, carrying eight science instruments and a small, six-wheel rover known as Pragyan, or “Wisdom,” was to have spent two weeks in lunar daylight studying the moon’s polar environment in a mission seen as a demonstration of India’s increasingly sophisticated space prowess…
“The Vikram lander descent was as planned and normal performance was observed up to an altitude of 2.1 kilometers (1.3 miles),” Sivan said in a brief update a few minutes later that was carried on ISRO’s webcast. “Subsequently, the communications from the lander to the ground station was lost. The data is being analyzed.”
If they had succeeded, India would have become just the fourth nation to execute a soft landing on the moon. We’ll find out this Wednesday if the new mission can succeed where the previous one failed.
The failure of the Russian lander is probably going to be tough on Putin who frequently refers to Russia’s history and success in space as proof he leads a great nation. But all of Russia’ recent space exploration missions have been failures.
The last unqualified success was more than 35 years ago, when the Soviet Union was still intact. A pair of twin spacecraft, Vega 1 and Vega 2, launched six days apart. Six months later, the two spacecraft flew past Venus, each dropping a capsule that contained a lander that successfully set down on the hellish planet’s surface, as well as a balloon that, when released, floated through the atmosphere. In March 1986, the two spacecraft then passed within about 5,000 miles of Halley’s comet, taking pictures and studying the dust and gas from the comet’s nucleus.
Subsequent missions to Mars that launched in 1988 and 1996 failed.
The embarrassing nadir came in 2011 with Phobos-Grunt, which was supposed to land on Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, and bring back samples of rock and dirt to Earth. But Phobos-Grunt never made it out of Earth’s orbit after the engines that were to send it to Mars did not fire. A few months later, it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.
The consensus is that Russia simply doesn’t have the same quality of digital technology that the US does. As we’ve seen with Russia’s weapons, they are often reliant on chips made in the US. Without access to those chips, they are having a hard time operating in space. Originally, this mission was intended to be a joint operation with the European space agency, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put an end to that.
Initially, Roscosmos and the European Space Agency planned to partner on Luna 25, as well as Luna 26, Luna 27 and the ExoMars rover.
But that partnership ceased in April 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the ESA Council moved to “discontinue cooperative activities with Russia.”
So the reality here is that this mission probably would have been a success if not for the invasion. Here’s hoping Putin’s career as dictator for life is also impacted by this failure.
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