CrimeaPRESS reports:
On the eve of Roskosmos announced the crash of «Luna-25».
Automatic station «Luna-25», according to preliminary calculations, ceased to exist, colliding with the surface of the moon. About it declared journalists at Roscosmos.
They recalled that on August 19, an impulse was provided for the formation of a pre-landing elliptical orbit.
At about 14:57 Moscow standard time, communication with the Luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted— said the state corporation.
Roscosmos stressed that the measures to search for the apparatus and establish communication with it on August 19 and 20 did not yield results.
According to the results of the preliminary analysis, due to the deviation of the actual parameters of the impulse from the calculated ones, the Luna-25 spacecraft switched to an off-design orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the lunar surface— said the state corporation.
Roscosmos added that a specially formed interdepartmental commission would deal with the issues of finding out the reasons for the loss of the spacecraft.
Recall that the carrier rocket «Soyuz-2.1b» with the automatic station «Luna-25» was launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome at 02:10 Moscow time on August 11. On August 12 and 14, the spacecraft made two trajectory corrections. On Wednesday, August 16, the automatic station entered lunar orbit. On August 21, the landing of the apparatus was planned.
Meanwhile, in China, they announced their intention for space cooperation with Russia after the loss of Luna-25. Thus, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that Beijing will continue to take an open position and will adhere to the principles that ensure universal access to the relevant program of the International Scientific Lunar Station.
TASS gives a chronology of unsuccessful «lunar missions» of the last decade.
«Longjiang-1» (PRC)
On May 25, 2018, a Chinese Long March 4C carrier rocket launched the Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) relay satellite from the Xichang Cosmodrome in the Chinese province of Sichuan. It was successfully brought to the point of gravitational equilibrium between the Earth and the Moon L2 (one of the Lagrange points), located at a distance of about 455 thousand km from the Earth and 65 thousand km from the Moon, and then ensured the operation of the Chang’e-4 spacecraft in 2019 , exploring the far side of the moon. Together with Queqiao, two small radio astronomy satellites were launched: Longjiang-1 and Longjiang-2. The second of them was successfully launched into lunar orbit and worked for about a year, and the control system on Longjiang-1 failed.
Bereshit (Israel)
On February 22, 2019, the American Falcon 9 launch vehicle from the US Air Force Base at Cape Canaveral (Florida) launched the Bereshit interplanetary vehicle, developed by the private Israeli company SpaceIL. It was a planetary rover, which was supposed to move on the surface of a natural satellite of the earth by jumping, using rocket engines. On April 11, 2019, Bereshit crashed while landing on the moon. According to SpaceIL, the failure of the onboard acceleration sensor led to the shutdown of the main engine and loss of control over the device.
«Chandrayan-2» (India)
On July 22, 2019, using the LVM3 launch vehicle, launched from the Space Center. Satish Dhavan on the island of Sriharikota in the Bay of Bengal, the Indian automatic station Chandrayan-2 was launched. The main purpose of the mission was to deliver the landing platform «Vikram» with the «Pragyan» lunar rover to the region of the south pole of the Earth’s satellite. On September 6, 2019, the landing on the moon of the Vikram module failed: communication with it was lost at an altitude of 2.1 km from the lunar surface.
OMOTENASHI (Japan) and Lunar IceCube (USA)
On November 16, 2022, the United States launched from the Space Center. John F. Kennedy in Florida, the SLS (Space Launch System) launch vehicle with the Orion spacecraft as part of the Artemis lunar program, which successfully completed a flight around the Moon and returned to Earth on December 11 of the same year. At the same time, two small spacecraft launched with Orion and intended to study the Moon failed to complete their mission. Communication was lost with the Japanese lander OMOTENASHI, which was supposed to work out the technology of a «semi-rigid» landing on the surface, and the American lunar satellite Lunar IceCube, designed to search for water ice.
Hakuto-R (Japan), Rashid (UAE) and Lunar Flashlight (USA)
On December 11, 2022, an international mission was launched from the Cape Canaveral cosmodrome using a Falcon 9 launch vehicle — the Japanese landing spacecraft Hakuto-R with the Rashid planetary rover of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the small Japanese SORA-Q robotic planetary rover. On April 25, 2023, Hakuto-R accelerated sharply in the last seconds before landing and communication with it was lost. According to experts, the spacecraft made a hard landing on the moon. The mission was declared a failure. Along with Hakuto-R and two rovers, the small American spacecraft Lunar Flashlight, designed to search for ice on the moon, was also lost.
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