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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.
